"Slow Run" on Xiaohongshu, "Quick Escape" for employees in big factories

Editor | Yang Bocheng

Caption | IC Photo

Recently, the topic of age requirements for recruitment at Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) has sparked discussions.

It was reported that a former ByteDance employee revealed that a former colleague was rejected during an interview at Xiaohongshu simply because they were over 32 years old. Employees from Youku also mentioned that applicants for sales positions at Xiaohongshu who were over 35 years old did not receive offers. A headhunter who claimed to help Xiaohongshu with recruitment commented that if you are over 32 years old, it's basically impossible to get hired at Xiaohongshu.

At the same time, high turnover rate has become a major characteristic of Xiaohongshu, where employees who have worked for more than two years are referred to as "living fossils," as many people leave after only 3 to 4 months. Behind the high turnover rate are frequent organizational restructuring and uncertain strategic directions of the company.

From its early days as a PDF platform to a social commerce app, Xiaohongshu has been in existence for eleven years and is considered a pioneer among many internet companies, yet it always gives the impression of not growing up.

I. No one can stay young forever, but Xiaohongshu can

"The age limit for recruitment is 35 years old, and those over 32 years old may not be allowed in." At first glance, this may seem unreasonable, but it makes sense in the context of Xiaohongshu.

According to QianGua data, Xiaohongshu currently has over 300 million monthly active users, with a male-to-female ratio of 3:7, 50% of users born after 1995, and 35% born after 2000. Users from first and second-tier cities account for 50% of the total. The community has over 80 million content creators, with a daily user search penetration rate of 60% and 90% of content being user-generated.

It is evident that Generation Z is the core user base for Xiaohongshu's growth. Labels such as "youthful and energetic" and "national lifestyle guide" give Xiaohongshu strong penetration among the population and brand universality, making it a key platform for nurturing and reaching consumers. Therefore, the company aims to promote a younger organizational structure to build a team that is always vibrant, creative, and in tune with the spirit of young people.

Despite strict age requirements, Xiaohongshu is willing to invest in talent.

It is understood that Xiaohongshu's 2024 campus recruitment offers high compensation: a starting monthly salary of 19,000 RMB, an annual package of up to 800,000 RMB, both with 16 months' pay. Xiaohongshu also provides year-end double pay + performance bonuses, signing bonuses for campus recruits, and varying amounts of stock options.

Moreover, data shows that the average monthly salary of employees at Xiaohongshu is 44,660 RMB, significantly higher than the industry average. 26% of employees earn between 37,000-47,000 RMB, while 29% earn between 47,000-56,000 RMB.

Specifically, the average monthly salary for technical positions at Xiaohongshu is 48,088 RMB, operations positions 34,390 RMB, product positions 45,529 RMB, marketing positions 40,903 RMB, design positions 43,027 RMB, and sales positions 32,649 RMB At the same time, according to revelations from Xiaohongshu employees, apart from salary and performance bonuses, Xiaohongshu's daily welfare benefits can also rival those of major companies. For example:

• The company provides three meals a day and afternoon tea;
• Monthly housing subsidy of 1,000 RMB, overtime pay is separate, double pay for weekend overtime, triple pay for holidays;
• Employees are enrolled in the six social insurances and housing fund upon joining, in addition to statutory holidays and annual leave, Xiaohongshu also provides employees with 5 days of welfare annual leave and 5 days of full-paid sick leave;
• Xiaohongshu also organizes many activities, such as visiting Disneyland twice a year on average, overseas team building, hackathons, Xiaohongshu Design Week, and more. Additionally, there are pet days and celebrity floor sweeping days.

It can be seen that Xiaohongshu demonstrates strong competitiveness in terms of salary and benefits. Its R7 level employees can receive company stock options, with an annual salary reaching 1-2 times the market average, earning the reputation of "small byte" in the recruitment industry. However, high salaries may also indicate higher expectations from the company, potentially leading to greater work pressure and responsibilities.

To stay "young" forever, Xiaohongshu has either actively or passively entered a wave of employee turnover.

II. Staying at the Company for Two Years Already Beats 80% of Employees

In an interview with Netease Technology, departing Xiaohongshu employees revealed, "The average tenure of people around me is only about half a year, and those who have worked for more than two years can be called 'living fossils'. Many people leave after only 3 to 4 months." Within less than a year of joining Xiaohongshu, both direct supervisors and senior managers in the reporting line have changed, with less than one-fifth of the team having worked for over two years.

Such a high frequency of turnover and low average tenure is not common even in internet companies where employee turnover is relatively frequent.

The reasons behind Xiaohongshu's high turnover rate, combined with its management model and the accounts of interviewees, can be summarized as follows.

Firstly, during campus recruitment, Xiaohongshu adopts a strategy of "high base, low rank; the higher the position, the quicker the dismissal". In other words, fresh graduates entering the workforce are not originally worth the high salary offered by Xiaohongshu. The company first attracts and screens talents with high salaries, then further screens them through various practical projects after joining, retaining those who are competent and swiftly dismissing those who are not.

Secondly, Xiaohongshu promotes an "after-action review culture" internally, aiming to refine reusable business thinking patterns through repeated scrutiny of task processes. However, several former employees revealed, "Under this culture, when your experience is fully exploited, your value also significantly decreases, and the company will replace you with younger, lower-cost employees."

The above two situations can be considered as Xiaohongshu's proactive layoffs, aimed at continuously selecting suitable employees and reducing labor costs. Many employees who voluntarily leave cannot tolerate Xiaohongshu's culture of overtime work and frequent business adjustments.

According to departing employees, Xiaohongshu has very long working hours, starting at 10 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m., with alternating weekends, and the intensity of work is no less than that of ByteDance. The long hours of high-intensity work have left many employees physically and mentally exhausted, unable to persist in the long term. More importantly, the company's strategic "adaptability" places immense pressure on employees, with projects and responsibilities frequently changing, leading to talent loss In 2023, Xiaohongshu clarified its development strategy of "sitting on one billion DAU and impacting three billion DAU" at a co-creation conference. However, at the end of last year, due to unfavorable initial growth, the original community operations leader Xie Yunwei left.

Therefore, in the first quarter of this year, Xiaohongshu poached a large number of mid-to-senior level managers from the industry to take on important positions in Xiaohongshu's commercial products, community operations, e-commerce products, legal affairs, and more. For example:

• In January, the former Didi supply and demand strategy leader Wu Yingbing and the former Didi Hitch business leader Zhang Rui joined Xiaohongshu.
• In February, Xiaohongshu poached Lu Lu, the new head of commercial products from Snapchat, mainly responsible for work in the search and artificial intelligence directions.
• In March, the new community operations leader Jiang Yuan officially took office and reported to Xiaohongshu's founder and CEO, Mao Wenchao.

It can be said that Xiaohongshu's management team has experienced significant turbulence. Apart from the founders Mao Wenchao, Qu Fang, and COO Conan, many executives at the CTO level, the original community content leader, the original product leader, the original e-commerce leader, the original CFO, the original VP, and many other executives have all left.

Some employees have said, "Within less than a year of joining, both my direct supervisor and upper-level leaders have changed. Projects on hand may suddenly be stopped, and leaders may suddenly be reassigned. Sometimes, when a department leader leaves, the entire business may just disappear." Frequent organizational restructuring and executive rotations have led to many projects and business lines being abruptly terminated or adjusted, causing many employees to either transfer to other departments and do work that does not match their abilities, or simply leave the company.

At the same time, Xiaohongshu, which has hired new executives from large companies, on one hand, has great confidence in the experience of these large companies, but on the other hand, may feel that these experiences are useless due to not seeing results in the short term. Therefore, not many new executives can stay.

Fundamentally, the high-level dissatisfaction with Xiaohongshu's growth rate and commercialization realization is what leads to frequent organizational restructuring and executive rotations. The high turnover rate is actually a result of the company's uncertain strategic direction and commercial anxiety.

1. After more than ten years, Xiaohongshu is still "finding itself"

In the past year, Xiaohongshu's commercialization has accelerated comprehensively, focusing on advertising, e-commerce, local life, and cultural tourism. However, these areas are already highly competitive, and Xiaohongshu does not have particularly outstanding competitive advantages. It is clearly not easy to seize opportunities in such a competitive landscape.

According to financial report data, in 2023, Xiaohongshu's MAU (monthly active users) has reached 312 million, with a year-on-year growth of 20%, making it the fastest-growing social media platform in China. In terms of revenue, it achieved an annual operating income of $3.7 billion, an 85% year-on-year growth; net profit of $500 million, finally crossing the loss performance line after more than ten years of establishment, turning losses into profits for the first time.

Overall, it seems good. However, in reality, despite Xiaohongshu's daily active users surpassing 100 million at the beginning of 2023 and setting a goal of reaching 140 million daily active users, this goal has not been achieved after a year of effort. Its reported annual revenue of over 20 billion RMB not only heavily relies on a single advertising business but also lags far behind the nearly 100 billion annual revenue of Kuaishou and the approximately 600 billion annual revenue of Douyin This is also why despite the decent financial data, the senior management is still dissatisfied with its growth rate and commercialization capabilities.

It is important to note that Xiaohongshu has two parallel main businesses: community and e-commerce. Although Xiaohongshu's "lifestyle" attribute in community content is clear, the positioning of the e-commerce business closely related to the community has always been ambiguous.

In the early years, Xiaohongshu focused on cross-border e-commerce and launched a welfare society, but the latter has always lagged far behind domestic leading platforms such as Tmall International and JD Global Purchase, and eventually closed in October 2023; in 2022, camping became popular, and Xiaohongshu launched its main self-operated outdoor product brand "Xiaoluozhou", but it still had low visibility and was also closed in October 2023; in 2023, Xiaohongshu increased its investment in live streaming e-commerce, while closing its self-operated e-commerce platform, it also raised the banner of "buyer e-commerce".

The concept of "buyer" originates from the fashion industry, emphasizing trends and aesthetics. Some higher education institutions in Europe and America even offer specialized courses in fashion buying. Xiaohongshu's exploration of "buyer e-commerce" is in line with the personalized aesthetics within its community and its long-standing gene of recommending products.

However, the label of "buyer" often represents niche and high-end, which puts Xiaohongshu's live streaming e-commerce in a dilemma: it is difficult to compete with more mature e-commerce platforms in terms of volume and supply chain by offering low prices; going high-end is not in line with the current trend of consumption downgrading in China and is not easy to scale up. In short, it seems difficult for "buyer e-commerce" to open up more commercialization space for Xiaohongshu.

While Xiaohongshu is still searching for a suitable commercialization model, the downside of frequent personnel turnover is beginning to show.

In an interview report by Phoenix Technology, former employees of Xiaohongshu's community department believe that Xiaohongshu's current products are not particularly user-friendly, with significant room for improvement in features such as posting notes and interactive comments. The frequent turnover of personnel not only slows down product updates but also affects the continuity and stability of product features, resulting in a poor user experience.

In recent years, Xiaohongshu has sparked controversies several times due to "server crashes". Although these incidents have not directly caused significant financial losses, they have greatly affected the user experience and platform reputation. In one extreme case, the solution was to ask users to delete and reinstall the app.

According to "New Vision" report, many merchants have complaints about Xiaohongshu's commercial operation platform, pointing out that entering the same background interface from different modules sometimes shows inconsistent results for basic data. Additionally, there are conflicts between Xiaohongshu's community department and commercialization department, with more instances of mutual blame shifting and serious "passing the buck" issues.

Even more serious, Xiaohongshu not only needs to address the above issues but also needs to be wary of the capital market's patience with it.

It is worth noting that Xiaohongshu's last round of financing was at the end of 2021, and its IPO has not made substantial progress, showing signs of shrinking in the private equity market. According to Altive (a private equity data platform), Xiaohongshu's implied valuation has dropped to $10 billion to $16 billion Currently, internally, frequent personnel turnover will not only increase the company's recruitment and training costs, but also affect business continuity and team cohesion. In the long run, it will also impact the company's talent structure and management level; externally, slow monetization and difficulty in finding capital, Xiaohongshu seems to have not yet found a suitable management and business model for itself.

It can only be said that Xiaohongshu, which has been established for over a decade, has accumulated strength, but has always lacked a "growth" opportunity. Instead of poaching people and seeking experience from major companies, it is better to stand firm, let change take root and sprout internally, and quietly wait for it to bear fruit