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Leaked Docs Reveal Microsoft’s Multimillion-Dollar Push for Meta’s AI Talent

Microsoft’s AI talent raid, TikTok’s automation layoffs, and where B2B wages are still climbing.

August 14, 2025

👋 Welcome, Jobseekers

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This week, leaked docs reveal Microsoft’s multimillion-dollar bid to poach Meta’s top AI talent, highlighting the roles getting the biggest budgets. TikTok is replacing its Berlin trust and safety team with AI and contractors, part of a broader wave of layoffs across tech. In hiring trends, most B2B sectors are slowing, but niches in education and software are still raising wages—prime ground for a pivot. Plus, we’ve got tools like Pramp for live interview practice and Plump for landing referrals at your dream company.

  • 🧑‍✈️ Career CoPilot: Leaked Docs Reveal Microsoft’s Multimillion-Dollar Push for Meta’s AI Talent

  • 📉 Layoff Report: TikTok to replace trust and safety team in Germany with AI and outsourced labor, 150 people

  • 📈 Trends & Data: B2B Hiring Slows—But One Sector’s Still Paying Up

  • 🔧 Jobseeker Tools: Pramp

📉 TikTok to replace trust and safety team in Germany with AI and outsourced labor

Source: TrueUp

TikTok workers in Germany are holding strikes over mass layoffs of the company’s trust and safety team. The social media behemoth said it is planning to dismantle its entire Berlin moderation team, which removes harmful content from the platform, and outsource the work to artificial intelligence and contract workers. This means the dismissal of 150 employees.

Leaked Docs Reveal Microsoft’s Multimillion-Dollar Push for Meta’s AI Talent

Overview: Microsoft has a leaked “most-wanted” list of Meta’s top AI talent and is firing off multimillion-dollar offers approved in just 24 hours to lure them away (Business Insider).

The Details:

  • The Target List: Meta teams in Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Meta AI Research are in Microsoft’s crosshairs.

  • Fast-Track Offers: “Critical AI talent” gets flagged, escalated, and sent a top-of-band offer within a day backed by custom comp modeling.

  • Big Money Moves: Microsoft is dangling multimillion-dollar packages. Meta has countered with $100M signing bonuses and $250M total deals for its biggest stars.

  • The Playmakers: The push is led by Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI and Jay Parikh’s CoreAI with dedicated recruiting strike teams.

  • The Timing: Microsoft just posted $76.4B in quarterly revenue (+18% YoY) while cutting about 9,000 jobs in an AI pivot.

Why It Matters (for jobseekers):

  • Go where the money is: Infrastructure and research roles such as distributed training, inference optimization, data pipelines, and GPU ops are getting the biggest budgets.

  • Make yourself “critical”: Showcase measurable wins like “cut serving costs 32% at 10k QPS” in code, blog posts, or open-source projects.

  • Not a research vet? AI platform PMs, QA and evals, data quality, privacy and compliance, and GPU SREs are riding the same hiring wave.

  • Negotiate hard: If you have the pedigree or proof of impact, the 24-hour offer window is prime time to push for equity and bonuses.

Bottom line: Prove you can boost model quality and cut costs and you might just land on Microsoft’s next “most-wanted” list.

📉 B2B Hiring Slows—But One Sector’s Still Paying Up

Overview:

Most B2B postings fell over the last year, but a few pockets are quietly lifting wages, which is where tech jobseekers should focus.

The Details:

  • Education and Instruction: Posted wages are up 3.5% year over year. Postings fell about 10% in the past year, yet remain about 26% above the pre-pandemic level.

  • Software Development: Wage growth improved over six months to +1.4% YoY. Postings are down 8.2% YoY and 36% below pre-pandemic.

  • Construction: Wage momentum fell 1.3 percentage points in six months and postings are down 5.6% YoY.

  • Banking and Finance: The only B2B category with more postings than last year at +3.7%, though still about 2% below pre-pandemic.

  • Overall Market: US postings are 4% above pre-pandemic and down 8% from last year.

Why it Matters:

If you're in the tech field, focus on specialized areas that still value unique skills. In education, consider roles like Instructional Designer, Learning Experience Designer, Curriculum Developer in STEM or AI, Corporate Trainer, LMS Administrator, Learning Data Analyst, Compliance Training Specialist, and Program Manager for bootcamps or certificates. In software, explore positions like Security Engineer, GRC and IAM roles, MLOps or LLM Ops, DevOps or SRE with a focus on cost-saving, Integration or API Platform Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Privacy Engineer, and Solutions Architect or Sales Engineer for learning and education technology software.

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