The company is becoming infamous for its bingeing on and purging of personnel. Winter before last, Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, then immediately announced 459 new openings. In the spring came more layoffs, followed soon after by billboards like the above, snapped by Flickr user "nfarmer" next to U.S. Highway 101: "We're hiring!"

Now the back-and-forth has reportedly reached the level of self parody as Yahoo toys with its recruiters, the very people who are supposed to facilitate the Web portal's hiring cycles. We hear Yahoo has been trying to hire fresh blood into its recruiting office, including some from Fox Interactive, where recruiting honcho Elaine Fortier used to work.

Fair enough, right? Except that Yahoo has laid off dozens of recruiters over the past eight months, telling them (says a tipster) they are eligible for re-hire and promising they would be notified of new opportunities at the company. None, apparently, were contacted for the latest round of hiring.

This leaves a good number of people out in the cold, since Yahoo has, we hear, reduced the size of its recruiting organization to roughly 40 at the Sunnyvale headquarters from 220 spread throughout the U.S. (including Southern California and New York) in December. Apparently some of these people even left jobs as lawyers to become recruiters. D'oh.

As tough as it is on workers, maybe this will turn out to be a wise strategy for Yahoo; once everyone in Silicon Valley has put in a stint at the company, they're bound to end up using some Yahoo product or another, if only to figure out how much their shares are worth.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had planned to have 1,000 employees by last December. A tipster at the company told us that despite pleas from executives as the economy melted down, Zuckerberg kept hiring — and the only reason he missed his headcount goal was that potential hires were balking at coming on board.

Now Facebook has posted a recruiting video touting the amazing number of photos being uploaded to the site (some 40 billion images in total). It's a slick, PR-friendly video. "What engineeer wouldn't want to work here?" gushes Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer.

Anyone smart enough to draw Facebook's interest, actually. Engineers of that caliber are perfectly capable of doing the math themselves on Facebook's storage requirements withou a video to help them along. If Facebook has to go to such efforts to make itself look cool, then it isn't by definition. No wonder Facebook employees are bitching about the company in internal surveys while Twitter poaches its top prospects.

The U.S. Army does indeed get 70 percent of its recruiting leads online now. But not necessarily because aspiring soldiers watched one of the Army's videos produced by ad agency MRM. Still, the Army's most popular clip, "Basic Combat Training." is worth a watch. Don't miss the part between 0:25 and 0:30, where a new female soldier uses the word "fun" twice to describe her experience, over footage of trainees firing semiautomatic rilfes and machine guns in mock battles. Hmm, when was the last time anyone I know in tech described their job as "fun?"

The interview process is a bit simpler than the weeks-long process for engineers. It starts, said one potential hire, with a phone interview, followed by a half-day interview session with a slew of recruiters. Google says they tell applicants immediately if they're hired. But then comes a month-long background check — don't worry, that Gmail account is perfectly safe — because they can't have just anybody spamming out press releases.

One reader got the pitch in person. Their story, after the jump.

The GOOG has also been hanging out at PRSA events...last March, at [a luncheon]...I was leaving the event and a Google recruiter came up to me and handed me an official business card (no name/title on front) with two names and phone numbers on the back...said if I was interested to give a call. I didn't call.

Earlier: Google's dumb publicist pitch leaked [Valleywag]
And: Google spamming to fill its PR department [Valleywag]

So, no sign of MySpace on campus this week. But the entire CS department job email list just got a recruiting email from Facebook. It's got a bunch of the same stats you already knew, but maybe some new ones too.

They mention, among other things, that that they plan to start doing "ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis." Hmm...

After the jump, Facebook's pitch to MIT students.

Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the US. They are a privately held company located in downtown Palo Alto near Stanford.

The environment is very fast-paced. New code is released every night. This is a huge difference from most companies where code is developed and tested for months or years before release.

There are lots of applications of:
Distributed systems - Most software needs to scale across hundreds of servers. Systems need to detect failures and work around them.

Machine learning - Facebook has over 7 million members, 60% of whom visit the site every day and over 90% of whom visit every month. The dataset is highly structured, and has applications for ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis.

Algorithms and optimization - With huge datasets (e.g. 7+ million active members with an average of 140 friends each), and hundreds of millions of page loads per day, efficiency starts to matter.

One measure of the impact you'll have is what they call the engineering leverage ratio: the number of page views the site gets every month divided by the number of engineers who build it. Facebook currently sends 9 billion pages per month with only 30 engineers, giving a ratio of 300 million page views per engineer. Google, on the other hand, has thousands of engineers and about the same number of page views as Facebook.

Facebook photos, created by just one engineer and one interaction designer over a couple of months this fall, already gets more traffic than any other photo site (e.g. webshots, yahoo photos, flickr). Over a million photos are uploaded every day.

Salary is competitive for silicon valley, and comes with stock options that have a good chance of being worth a lot of money in the future.

Either the world's biggest search company can't organize its schedules...or Google's doing this on purpose. Why?

Well, maybe they're just pulling a Frank Sinatra. The crooner used to bring a woman up to his room, where she'd see another woman waiting. Then everyone knew what Frank had planned. And to see Google do that? Man, that's slick.

Send your own "Why I didn't get hired" stories to tips@valleywag.com.