Facebook, the Meta-owned social media platform, announced that it is pausing on hiring, according to an internal memo that was first seen by the Business Insider on Wednesday.
According to Business Insider, CFO David Wehner said that this implementation is part of the company’s “reprioritisation” as it tackles challenges that caused it to miss revenue targets.
Facebook’s global head of recruiting, Miranda Kalinowski, said that the engineering team would be the first to be impacted by these hiring decisions. This was included in a separate memo that was also seen by the Business Insider.
A worker at Facebook said that the last time something of this sort was done it was at the start of the pandemic as the company scrambled to put in place processes to onboard new hires.
“The company regularly re-evaluates its hiring and according to our business needs and in light of the expense guidance given for this earnings period, we are slowing its growth accordingly,” a Meta spokesperson said.
“We will continue to grow our workforce to ensure we focus on long-term impact,” the spokesperson added.
David Wehner, CFO for Meta, said that the company is trying to “bring the metaverse to life”, which is pretty much what Facebook has been about since they rebranded to Meta.
“But we also have to be responsible by responding to the unpredictable market forces that have put pressure on our business over the past few months,” he said.
“As economies reopen after COVID-related lockdowns more people are spending time offline and returning to pre-pandemic spending patterns. That’s causing an industry-wide downturn,” Wehner added.
Kalinowski and Wehner said that they are still trying to figure out what the freeze means for other teams since the engineering team will be the first one to be impacted. They said that the implementation will, however, affect almost every team in the company.
They pointed out that one team that won’t be immediately impacted is Reality Labs, the loss-making unit in charge of building the metaverse.
“We will continue to actively hire for ML IC5+ candidates and IC7+ candidates across all SWE areas and will pause Director openings to assess our needs on a case by case basis,” Kalinowski said.
By Zintle Nkohla
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