Background
Meta is one of the largest social media and technology companies in the world today. The ongoing recession has cast a deep shadow in the hiring and recruitment scenario at Meta. Meta layoffs are constantly now the topic of discussion among its employees. Metaverse was one of the most inspired projects that Meta wanted to complete. Meta had invested billions of dollars in this Metaverse project. Interestingly the virtual reality job postings have been removed by Meta. Meta is no longer hiring for its virtual reality teams as it had planned to do before. The number of employees that were required earlier in the artificial intelligence and virtual reality projects in Meta has been considerably reduced. Employees are being asked to perform and do much more work than they were supposed to do earlier. This is also a strategy that Meta has taken to remove low performing workers. Meta has highlighted that there were many employees in the organization who should not be there. In order to save them from financial trouble, Meta is desperately trying to find non-essential employees. Prepare for your interview with the Meta interview questions below. Subscribe to get access to a collection of Meta interview coding and aptitude questions.
Read more: Is Meta on a hiring freeze? »
Subscribe for $12 per year. Get live stories and updates.
- Premium Articles & Downloads
- In-depth comprehensive analysis
- Monthly price of only a movie ticket
- 3000+ Practice Questions included
- Advanced Aptitude & Coding Questions
- Real-time feedback in every question
- Continuously updated database
- Wide coverage of industry news
- Career & IT Consultation, Contact Me
Thanks for reading
Insight Crunch.
Create your account orlog in to continue reading.
- Join thousands of subscribers
- Get instant access to this article
- Silicon Valley latest events coverage
- Unlimited access to Premium Articles
- Wide coverage of industry news
- Mock Tests for Strategic Preparation
- 3000+ problems on variety of topics
- Real-time feedback in every question
Support independent journalism.
Already a member? Login.
Meta Virtual Reality Hiring
Virtual reality was one of the new segments that Meta was excited about. Meta recruited a huge number of recruiters who helped them post jobs on virtual reality. However, the demand for virtual reality is now considerably less in Meta and job positions have disappeared. Meta no longer wants to continue hiring employees in their virtual reality division like before. The cryptocurrency crash and the technology sector slowdown has overall destroyed the demand of hiring skilled resources in Meta. Compared to Accenture, there is a huge difference in the skill sets at Meta in the virtual reality related job postings. Most of the virtual reality positions in Accenture are focused on design skills. The job positions in Meta on virtual reality are focused on research and development of new products. Accenture is mainly focusing on leveraging some existing tools and technologies that it has today to help its clients achieve the goals in the virtual reality segment.
Meta Hiring Freeze
Meta is focused on building new concepts that fit into their long term roadmap and vision in the virtual reality segment that will form a part of the Metaverse. Besides Meta, it has to be noted in that all the technology companies will be focused on expanding their market share in the Metaverse. In the last several years, there have been multiple teams that had been built in Meta to compete with Zoom, and teams which were supposed to build features of shopping. Many of these roles are now no longer in demand at Meta. There is also no new hiring going on for vacancies required to fill positions in these projects. There is a freeze in hiring in Meta for various engineering roles. There is a pause in hiring of any new recruiters in Meta along with data scientists. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the fear of layoffs cannot be ruled out. That hiring freezes might definitely lead to layoffs is what employees are fearing right now. The senior management at Meta has clearly mentioned that layoffs might have to be considered in the long run. The senior management at Meta has announced that their expectation is not to lay off employees. The organization is trying to manage their priorities and optimize their existing employee strength.
Meta Layoff Process
The leaders in Meta and the senior management has identified specific teams and have informed the team members that there won't be any new hiring of engineers for those teams. Those teams in Meta also will not receive any internal transfers of new engineers having different skill sets. This is a signal that those specific products in Meta are not profitable and do not align with the long term vision of Meta. Such projects will see minimum investment from Meta to keep them alive in this current economic situation. Various product teams that are already impacted by the hiring freeze in Meta include Meta dating and gaming, Meta Messenger kids, the Meta commerce team, and the Meta remote presence team. The Meta remote presence team was created to compete with Zoom during the work from home age. Even though various projects in Meta are seeing a hiring freeze, active recruitment is still going on for machine learning and artificial intelligence roles. Machine learning and AI are key priorities in Meta. And the management is putting a lot of energy and investment behind these specific skill sets.
Meta Reality Labs Hiring
Machine learning and artificial intelligence relate to the core business of Reality Labs division in Meta. Reality Labs is a division in Meta that works on software and hardware. There will be reprioritization of all the projects that exist in Meta today. The senior management at Meta has also said that employees will not be laid off immediately. All the employees who will be moving out of projects will get time to choose different teams and opportunities in the organization by closely working with Meta recruiters. Meta has been seriously hurt by the rise of TikTok. The stock price of Meta has also been plummeting significantly due to a huge sell off. The advertisement tracking changes built by Apple into its iPhone operating system is costing the company billions of dollars in advertisement revenue. Apple users are now enjoying better privacy and thus Meta is not able to collect data from their devices to show them relevant ads. Due to lesser quality ads users are clicking lesser into the ads that Meta are showing them. Advertisers are thus seeing lesser return for the same amount they're spending in Meta. Advertiser investments are thus going down.
Meta Growth and Wall Street
The Wall Street believes that Meta might be in troubled waters. However, Mark Zuckerberg assured the employees that the company had a rich balance sheet and billions of dollars in quarterly profit. As long as the company sees profitable quarters, there is no deep trouble for the company immediately. Meta had been in one of the strongest positions among the technology companies recently. A slower user growth might mean lesser profit. However, the company is yet to see substantial loss in its quarterly results. Growth is one of the most important factors that the Wall Street puts into consideration. The growth in Meta has slowed down and hence investors are pulling their money away and out of the stock. The Metaverse might take some time to become profitable. Until then, the rate of growth of Meta will determine how the stock price increases or decreases The hiring freeze is one of the approaches that Meta has taken to control its spending and improve its stock price.
Meta Slow Growth and Interns
The revenue at Meta is growing more slowly than expected. The war in Ukraine has caused an overall slowdown in the technology industry. Every team in the company will be seeing hiring cutbacks. This is expected to continue for quite a while now. It is interesting to note that Meta had increased its workforce considerably over the last few years. The headcount has increased dramatically over the last few years due to increased hiring of skilled, talented employees. Meta has also delayed the job offers for all its interns by several months. This would give the company more time to decide whether they would like to hire them at all. The company would be using this extra time to analyze their staffing needs. Due to the various reorganizations that is happening in the organization, the need for skilled resources is rapidly changing every day in the different parts of the organization. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he had hoped the economy would have stabilized by now. However, the economy has not yet stabilized and has a weak outlook in the near future.
Meta Hiring Threats
The senior management at Meta is planning on recruiting and hiring conservatively. Meta had plans to hire engineers this year, but the new target would be considerably less than what it had initially planned. Meta is also reducing its budget across all the teams. Now individual teams in Meta will have to find out how to handle headcount changes. Many teams that were in need of skilled resources might not get the required resources and have to manage accordingly. Meta had seen a decade of explosive growth in all fronts across all its products. But finally it will be shrinking its budgets widely within the company across different teams. Meta is throwing a lot of weight behind the virtual reality and artificial intelligence segments which are empowering its Metaverse. Meta is also focused on building profitable short form video product like Reels that will compete with TikTok and Snapchat. Meta is one of the few technology companies that are downsizing currently. However, the hiring freeze is signaling dangerous times for the company. Meta is dealing with newer threats to its advertising business from Apple and that is adding on to its challenge of turning the business model profitable. Meta had already been freezing its hiring in certain teams within its organization. However, the overall hiring freeze is something that the employees at Meta has never seen before. This is going to be creating a fear of losing job among the Meta employees. Meta has also suspended all hiring and along with warning the employees of possible layoffs. The global economic slowdown is also affecting the policies of Meta.
2 thoughts on “Is Meta on hiring freeze?”