Background

Meta is the parent company of Facebook and is one of the largest technology corporations in the world today. Due to the ongoing economic slowdown, there has been a decline in the revenue of Meta in recent years. The senior management at Meta has told its employees to be ready for an intense period for the next few years. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has requested the Meta managers to start identifying weak performers within the organization for layoff. The employees at Meta have already been informed about a freeze in the hiring process. Besides less hiring, there has been a reduction in budget across all the teams in Meta, due to which it will not be easy to fill up new positions like before. Many of the new vacant positions are no longer filled because the projects are considered not a priority. The team size of the projects are being considerably reduced, and every individual team leader is being asked to optimize their team and restructure as best as possible. Teams across the organization have been asked to focus only on the long term priority goals of Meta and to save finances only for critical projects. Prepare yourself with the Meta interview questions below before you apply for the Meta job positions.

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Meta Layoff Reason

For several decades, Meta had reported record growth and thus impressed its investors with the ability to consistently exceed financial forecasts and deliver an amazing amount of revenue. All of this was based on a relationship model where users used to love using more of Facebook and Instagram, and hence advertisers used to spend a lot of money investing in Meta thus delivering record profits. The strategy that Meta has taken to layoff his employees starts with identifying the parts of the company that has previously seen unchecked growth. Every project within the organization is going to be analyzed and assessed if they're really critical or not. If these projects are adding substantial value to the financial condition of Meta, or the long term vision, then these projects will be allowed to continue. Otherwise, such project team leaders are being asked to downsize and optimize their team thus leading to layoffs of a number of employees.

Meta Layoff Process

In recent years, Meta is dealing with multiple challenges, which include the global economy, competition from rivals, as well as data privacy regulatory threats. There has been several question and answer session between the employees and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg reflected that the approach of the company has to be more conservative than before. Reducing the budgets is something that all the managers across the organization in Meta will have to participate in. One of the approaches is by letting the emptied positions and roles stay vacant. If there is no substantial progress in this regard, then the other option comes down to laying off employees thus reducing the headcount. The managers in Meta have already started working in identifying low performing employees. This has been termed as a performance review process. There are various benchmarks to identify low performing employees. Once an employee is removed from a project, there is a certain timeframe of a few weeks within which the employee must find another project with the help of the Meta recruiters. If the employees did not find other roles within the company within the given time, they are at risk of losing their job.

Meta Budget Cuts

The Meta senior management also highlighted that their plan is to aggressively reduce the overall headcount over the next few years. Their plan is to shrink the team size in several departments so that they can shift their energy to the actual critical projects. There is no expectation of increasing the headcount which we have seen in the last few years. Metaverse is one of the key areas where Meta has been investing heavily and there is a high demand for virtual reality and artificial intelligence skills in these departments. Meta has reported a decline in its growth and that has not impressed Wall Street. It is reflected from its stock price which has been declining heavily. The current situation in Meta signifies the end of decades of rapid growth for the social media giant. This would be a major budget cut in Meta in the last 20 years. This is a major restructuring that the company will be facing, and we can only wait and see how it works out. The budget cuts will not only be in teams that are not performing and profitable, but also in teams that are growing.

Meta Teams Restructuring

The Meta headcount changes have to be sorted out internally within individual teams. This means many empty positions will not get the skilled resources that they were waiting for. Many people will also get shifted to other teams. Many people will also be removed from the team because they will be identified as low performing employees. Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that they expected the economy to be more stable, but that has not happened. This had forced them to proceed cautiously and conservatively in this current economy. Many experts believe however, the senior management at Meta is taking advantage of the current economic situation to make unpopular decisions. The senior management would not have been able to take such layoff decisions as easily before. The advertising revenue growth of Meta has been falling drastically after Apple launched its privacy focused changes. These changes allow users to have more privacy and share less data with Meta, which in turn has directly affected its advertising revenue algorithm. With less tracking in iPhone, advertisers are now not able to show targeted ads to Meta users. Lesser quality ads mean fewer clicks on the ads and lower revenue for Meta. Because advertisers will now no longer invest as heavily in Meta as they used to earlier due to not so impressive results on user clicks.

Meta Algorithm Competition

The algorithm that is currently most impressive in the social media market is from TikTok. The algorithm created by TikTok is focused on content discovery, rather than user tracking. All users are now conscious about the data being shared with Meta. Due to this, users are preferring the optimized and privacy focused algorithm developed by TikTok which is also providing much better user experience in terms of the content. Meta is losing its edge when it comes to adoption of users by the newer generation. All the newer generation users are focusing much more on Snapchat and TikTok. TikTok is also attracting young users away from Instagram, because the content and the appearance of the app is much better than Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg is also making an expensive investment on the Metaverse, which is aimed to be completed in the next few years. However, the Metaverse will not help in Meta's profitability in the near term. The Metaverse will provide an immersive virtual reality experience, where the Meta senior management imagines people will eventually communicate. The Metaverse will need to see a huge amount of investment for several years before realizing whether it works out or not.

Meta Hiring Freeze

Meta was slowing down hiring for many of the management roles, and also had postponed handing out the full time job offers to the interns. Meta said it is focused on not increasing the employee headcount in the teams where they do not expect to have roles the following year. These actions are being taken in line with the similar announcements that Meta's senior management had provided earlier regarding headcount reduction. The priority projects of Meta include Instagram Reels, and the Metaverse. The company is expected to be a much smaller company by the end of the next few years. Over the last few decades, the company had been growing very fast. When the revenue fell, it is time for the company to restructure and optimize itself. The annual expenses of Meta have also been significantly high, but less than initially projected. Meta is also focused on creating a dual camera watch, but it has reduced the priority of the project to control its spending. Besides Meta, there are other organizations like Twitter, which has also been affected due to their advertising focused business model. They are also asking their employees to control their expenses and reduce their costs related to traveling and marketing. Google has also said it would slow down in hiring over the next few years, along with Snapchat, which has also been working in optimizing its workforce.

Meta in Trouble

Meta had been increasingly adding more employees in the last few years including recruiters who helped in processing and evaluating these new candidates. But now that the there is a slowdown in hiring, the need for recruiters no longer exists in Meta. The recruiter position is at most risk of getting laid off currently. Besides the recruiters there is also the position of low level data scientists roles which is at risk of getting laid off. There are a good deal of senior management and middle management roles that is also being considered for layoff. Many low performing employees are being identified by the new performance review process who are being removed from the team as part of Meta layoffs. Although Meta says all employees are given a limited time to find a new role or position within the organization, it is not always successful because all the teams within the organization are trying to cut down the size of their teams. Hence, many employees are struggling during their waiting period and then finally getting laid off from Meta. It is indeed a dangerous situation to work in Meta right now. Because employees are constantly concerned about their job security. No one wants to be at the receiving end of the low performing performance review process right now in Meta.