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Startup Pillow Is Recruiting Laid-Off Twitter Engineers With a Promoted Tweet

Too soon?

Pillow/ Twitter

Is it the most opportunistic tweet ever? Or is Pillow just looking to give Twitter’s free-falling engineers a soft place to land?

Apparently Pillow, a property management startup for people renting homes on sites like Airbnb, bought a promoted tweet Tuesday to advertise a few job openings at the company. That’s nothing special — startups do it all the time — but this one specifically targeted engineers from Twitter. The same engineers that had just been laid off earlier that morning.

The tweet included an image that said “Twitter Engineers Wanted,” along with the the text, “Why keep working with the same 140 characters? Come home to Pillow.”

So Twitter employees freshly axed from Twitter were then recruited on Twitter using a promoted tweet. You with me? It looks as though Pillow’s tweet has since expired, but not before former Twitter comms director Matt Graves tweeted out a screenshot (above). Pillow hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

For some, the promoted tweet is likely hitting home a little too soon. But Pillow is far from the only company looking to recruit the 300-plus Twitter employees who were ousted Tuesday as part of company-wide layoffs. We’ve seen lots of tweets, including this one from Y Combinator President Sam Altman, who is also recruiting.

Update: We heard back from Pillow, who gave us a pretty straightforward explanation for the ad. “We saw an opportunity to recruit some of the best talent in the world, and also an opportunity for them to join Pillow,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

There are tons of companies employing a similar tactic — below, just a sampling — and Twitter user @cra has invoked another Twitter product, Collections, to curate the perfect list of offers for the on-the-go unemployed Twitter engineer. (Hat tip to our former social media manager @AnthonyQuintano!)

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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