Background

Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that it will freeze hiring and restructure all the teams within the organization in order to optimize its finances and focus on long term priorities. The senior management at Meta also said that they are focused on reducing the budget across most of the teams within the organization. This would also include teams that are growing and are being profitable. Mark Zuckerberg said that individual teams within the company will need to find out how to handle headcount changes. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the company should be ready for more downsizing in the coming years. There were several internal meetings in the company during which the senior management at Meta passed this information to its employees. There has been a decline in revenue at Meta and some of these decisions are due to these financial figures. Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned that he will not be ruling out layoffs in the organization. Prepare with the Meta interview questions below to stay ready.

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Meta Performance Review Process

The senior management at Meta also highlighted that there are many employees within the organization who should not be there at all. Meta is creating a strategy to identify low performing workers by creating more aggressive goals. The expectations from employees have been dramatically increased so that all the employees are forced to work hard. The Meta senior management pointed out that if any employee feels that this is too much work pressure, then they are free to move to other opportunities. Meta has decided to reduce its overall headcount in the coming years. There has been a lot of intake for different roles within the organization. Due to this the headcount of Meta has steadily increased over the last few years. However, due to the slowing demand, and the overall weak global economy, there is a slowdown in hiring currently. The slowdown in Meta's revenue growth is also due to the privacy changes that has been brought by Apple in the iOS operating system.

Meta Revenue Decline

Users are now more focused on data privacy. Meta is currently unable to accumulate and track user data as much as before due to the privacy changes in iPhone and other Apple hardware. With less ad data, Meta is now not able to show relevant ads to its users like before. Advertisers are thus seeing less benefit by investing in Meta. Due to this advertiser spending is also going down which was one of the major sources of income for Meta. Due to the decrease in advertiser income, the explosive growth that Meta has experienced for the last several decades is coming down sharply. Wall Street is mainly focused on the growth potential of Meta in the future. Due to low growth potential currently, the stock price of Meta is also taking a hit. The stock price of Meta has been constantly falling for several months. This is something that the company has never experienced before since it was founded. There is a huge sell off in the market. Based on the balance sheet and financial condition of Meta, the data privacy and regulatory challenges that Meta had to answer for was also one of the reasons that led users away from trusting Meta like before.

Meta Layoff Process

Employees in Meta are now scared that they will fall into the layoff bucket in the new performance review process. During the hiring freeze, Meta has seen there is a bunch of people who should not be within the company. And so all the teams are looking for low performing employees. With aggressive goals, Meta will be able to streamline its workforce and reduce its headcount even faster than before. What this will do is create a sense of panic and fear among all the employees. All Meta employees will now struggle and fear about their job security. Everyone will be thinking if they are the next person in line for the Meta layoffs going on. All Meta employees will need to work harder than before. Meta is planning to prioritize some projects within the organization more than the other projects. Metaverse is one of the priority projects in Meta. The project of Metaverse will take few years to mature and see any substantial gains and profits. Until then, Metaverse, will continue to be a project that will see a lot of investment in Meta, but without any significant profit.

Meta Projects Priority

Skills of artificial intelligence and virtual reality are in heavy demand in the Metaverse project. The senior management at Meta is focused on building up teams with these specific skill sets in the organization. Meta is also prioritizing financial investments in the Metaverse project more than any other project. Meta is certain that the future of social media will be in the virtual environment where users will interact. And hence Metaverse is going to be a very successful venture. However, investors are only concerned with a confirmed near term vision which the Metaverse project does not provide. Hence, due to an unclear roadmap, and a lack of optimism from the Wall Street segment, the stock price of Meta continues to fall. Meta has seen a steep decline in its stock price in the past few years which it has never seen since it was founded. This is triggered by a huge sell off of the Meta stock due to the declining overall scenario in the world, due to the war, and the economic recession.

Meta Financial Trouble

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he had hoped the economy would have stabilized by now, but the economy is continuing to be volatile and there is no stable future in sight. So, even if people are leaving, during the hiring freeze there is no hiring of any replacement for them. This is one of the strategies Meta has taken to boost and optimize its finances. The teams across Meta in all departments is shrinking. And Meta senior management has given every team leader the ability to decide for themselves how best to optimize their team and how to restructure with a constant view on profitability and long term initiatives. The revenue of Meta has also seen challenging growth. The revenue has not seen explosive growth as we are used to seeing in the years before. In this challenging market, similar to many other sectors, the technology sector is struggling and Meta has been hit one of the hardest. One of the most common roles in Meta that is in risk of laying off are the recruiters, and data scientists.

Meta jobs with high layoff risk

During the last few years, there was a huge demand for technical recruiters in Meta who helped assist in the hiring and evaluation of the new candidates. But due to a slowdown in hiring the demand for recruiters has also dropped considerably. As part of the new performance review process, every Meta employee who will be removed from a team will get a certain time to look for other projects and roles in the organization. If they are not able to find a suitable role for themselves, then they are being laid off. Most of the time it is very difficult to find another team within the organization because during the hiring freeze all the teams are trying to optimize and reducing their headcount. Identifying low performers in Meta is a constant process and every team has been asked to find the lowest performing employees for the downsizing activity. Meta is also trying to optimize their spending by cutting contractors and terminating several projects in its Reality Labs division, which included a dual camera smartwatch project.

Meta Hiring Freeze

Meta is taking a variety of approaches to reduce the headcount. Reduction in staff at the team level can happen by not replacing employees who have left, by moving people to other teams, and by seeking to layoff people who are not succeeding or are performing less than the new required standard. Many of the teams will be made smaller than before, so that Meta can shift its energy to actually promising ventures that are more aligned to the long term vision of the organization. Meta said they had hoped that the economy would have stabilized by now, but since that is not the case, the management at Meta had been forced to plan its coming years more conservatively. Mark Zuckerberg and the senior management at Meta also mentioned that the hiring freeze was a necessary evil as they do not want to hire people in teams where they don't expect to have growth potential next year. Meta has internally set very high targets to cut down its cost, and it will be taking steps like layoffs to meet that goal.

Meta and the overall slowdown

The company's revenue dropped considerably since it was founded decades ago. There is an ongoing inflation in the global economy that has hit the technology sector severely. There has been an increase in the interest rate and the war in new Ukraine is bringing in bad news regularly. These macroeconomic situations have affected Meta and many other companies similar to Meta who are working in similar business model in the technology sector. DocuSign also is cutting down on its workforce along with Lyft and Google. Uber, Microsoft, and Apple has also cut down or frozen their hiring activities due to an effect of their revenue due to the global economy. Twilio and Robinhood along with Oracle also reported laying off their staff. There has been a report from several experts and analytical firms who have estimated several thousand workers being laid off in the technology sector already due to the ongoing massive job cuts. They also expect the figure to rise considerably in the following years.