Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s growth strategy is working in at least one respect: recruitment.
Mayer, who likes to say that hiring the right talent will fuel the company’s turnaround, told investors on Tuesday that Yahoo! has been seeing “record volumes of interest” from prospective hires — including 17,000 résumés in a single week last quarter.
But for Mayer, who took the helm last year, the talent boom has yet to translate into financial gains.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company posted a drop in profit and revenue in the third quarter as its core advertising business continued to lose ground.
Revenues fell less than 1 percent $1.08 billion, excluding costs paid to third-party websites to drive traffic to Yahoo.
Display-ad revenues, a closely watched area because it makes up 40 percent of the company’s sales, fell nearly 7 percent, despite Mayer’s recent inroads into driving traffic to Yahoo’s sites.
Mayer said traffic growth that started in the second quarter continued last quarter, including a 15 percent increase since July 2012, when she took the helm.
Excluding certain items, Yahoo earned 34 cents per share, a penny above the average analyst estimate, but still down from 39 cents a year ago.
The shares rose slightly in after-hours trading to $33.69. Investors have pushed the stock up 67 percent this year, driven by faith that Mayer, a former top Google executive, will turn around the company.
One Yahoo! holding that is keeping investors happy is Chinese search engine Alibaba Group, which reported a profit increase of 159 percent last quarter to $707 million.
Yahoo, which holds a 24 percent stake, announced a new agreement with Alibaba that allows it to hold on to a greater number of shares once the Chinese company goes public.
The new agreement requires Yahoo to sell 208 million shares in connection with the stock offering, down from 261.5 million.