When Marissa Mayer goes shopping, she skips the Manolo's and the Louis Vuitton bags. Instead, in her role as Yahoo CEO, she purchases promising companies that have talented personnel.

Her 19th acquisition since taking the reins of Yahoo is social data analytics company Ztelic, which is based in Beijing. The company was actually founded by a former Yahoo employee, Hao Zheng. Hao left Yahoo to become CTO of social game company Zynga before founding Ztelic.

With the exception of its purchases of Tumblr, Summly and Xobni (News - Alert), Yahoo has classified its acquisitions as "talent acquisitions." A statement from Yahoo said that Hao would play a major leadership role in its Beijing Global R&D Center.


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In addition to acquiring talent, Yahoo may gain other advantages from the Ztelic acquisition. Yahoo is currently focused on personalizing its offerings, such as Yahoo News, Flickr and user homepages, delivering targeted information based on consumption, browsing and connections.

Additionally, Ztelic could enable Yahoo to develop more relevant targeted advertising to its users, potentially ramping up the company's mobile platform.

Critics of Melissa Mayer have questioned her efforts to improve the talent pool at Yahoo. Lou Adler, author of "Hire With Your Head," says that Mayer is tightening hiring standards when she's facing hiring scarcity. She no longer works at Google (News - Alert), where hiring managers hope to weed out weak candidates with highly specific job descriptions.

Adler suggests that Yahoo needs to rethink its recruiting strategy to focus less on academics, skills and required experience levels and to focus more on a candidate's past performance. The key is to find talented future Yahoo employees that aren't necessarily looking for jobs right now.

Buying companies to acquire talented employees like Hao is one way to access people that aren't currently on the lookout for jobs. Mayer has also invested in talent acquisition by hiring Sandy Gould, formerly a recruitment executive for Disney (News - Alert)/ABC, to be its senior vice president of global talent acquisition and development.