Indonesia may be one of the countries with the largest number of Facebook users in the world but until today Facebook has yet to set up an office in the country – although it’s not entirely necessary. Several recent information however indicate that Facebook may well finally do just that. This morning we received word that Facebook is looking for a growth manager for Indonesia, a position based in Facebook’s office in Singapore.
Even though growth manager is a short term contractual position, this seems to be the first time that Facebook is explicitly and officially looking for an employee to deal with Indonesia. The growth of Facebook users in Indonesia looks to have stalled recently and this position is responsible to ensure that it returns to positive growth numbers.
We’ve also received information from a very credible source that Facebook is currently looking for a candidate to fill the position of country manager for Indonesia. If this is confirmed then we predict that Facebook may well open its Indonesian office some time in 2013. At the moment Facebook in Southeast Asia is being represented in Singapore and Malaysia.
Other than the two information mentioned above, yesterday Facebook held its Facebook Developers World HACK in Jakarta as part of a series of events being held in 12 cities around the world. The winner, though not always, may receive a chance to be offered an engineering position on Facebook. While there is currently no opening for engineers in Singapore or Malaysia, the fact that Jakarta was one of the three Asian cities chosen to host the hack (others are Taipei and Bangalore) shows the strong interest that Facebook has to seek for local software engineering talents
A number of representative offices of major Internet companies here in Indonesia previously went through the same process prior to actually opening their offices in the country. Yahoo! and Google for example, began their recruitment process through their respective Singapore offices for key positions. Yahoo! eventually opened its local office in 2010 while Google came to town earlier this year.