The social media and technology company, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company is freezing hiring across the board. The company has also warned that more layoffs are in the pipeline.
Zuckerberg mentioned during the last Meta earnings call that ‘Our plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. Many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas.’
Zuckerberg made these comments during an internal call to employees. In May, he announced a hiring freeze affecting certain segments of Meta. However, he has now expanded the hiring freeze across departments and verticals.
Earlier, Zuckerberg said, “The company has reduced its target for hiring engineers in 2022 to around 6,000-7,000, down from an initial plan to hire about 10,000 new engineers.”
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement, “The memo was intended to build on what we’ve already said publicly in earnings about the challenges we face and the opportunities we have, where we’re putting more of our energy toward addressing.”
Facebook’s parent company Meta is currently reducing staff to cut costs amid the economic downturn, apparently putting some of them on traditional 30 to 60 days ‘lists’ to find a new role within the company or leave.
Meta has a ‘long practice’ where employees whose roles are eliminated are subject to termination if they can’t find a new job internally within a month.
Admitting that the social network has entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business, Zuckerberg said that many ‘teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company’.
Mark Zuckerberg said in July that the company plans to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. The run by him had 83,553 employees at the end of the second quarter of this year.
