Yahoo is undergoing a massive transformation in an effort to shake off its Web 1.0 identity in a Web 2.0 world, under its new, vivacious CEO Marisa Mayer. One of its strategies involves the fast, ambitious, aggressive hiring of new talent. Hiring is what’s happening in every area of the company’s operations and recently it revealed it will hire an additional 125 people to fill a call center that is currently being constructed near its data center in the Town of Lockport. N.Y. industrial park.
Interestingly, the numbers of new hires exceeds the original plan by nearly ten. Yahoo’s original plan involved hiring 115 new workers to join the existing 77 who work at the current data center..
This past week, the search giant began advertising its positions at prominent university campuses in Buffalo. In addition, a job fair will be held shortly on the UB North Campus, which will continue until Friday this week.
The construction of the Lockport facility is expected to take 12 to 18 more months to be finished. In the meantime, the newly appointed customer care team will occupy a leased space in Amherst. Mauricio Quibano, senior manager for global planning and sourcing for Yahoo Customer Experience revealed that of all new hires, 15 are to work as supervisors while the rest will work as customer care agents for the Internet giant.
These are all full time positions, for which pay will range from the mid-teens to $20 per hour, Quibano added.
Yahoo is spending an estimated $168 million on the call center construction project.
The project earned the company an extensive set of tax breaks and an allocation of low-cost electricity. The new call center will be Yahoo’s third in this country, joining a facility in Omaha, Neb., and another outside Portland, Ore.