Did Meta Layoff or Freeze Hiring?

A post went viral on LinkedIn just recently, where Stephanie Washington stated in her post that she was supposed to join META on Monday the 10th of May 2022 but was laid off over a phone call. She was left hurt and she came to share her devastation with the LinkedIn community. See her post here a lot of controversies are surrounding this post where some say she was laid off by the hiring agencies whose contract was canceled by Meta, and a few say the layoffs are real.

This makes us wonder what is going on at Meta? One thing we do know for sure is that the Facebook parent company is slowing down recruitment. Andrea Beasley spokesperson for Meta said to FOX Business, "We regularly re-evaluate our talent pipeline according to our business needs and in the light of the expense guidance given for this earnings period, we are slowing its growth accordingly." She also stated that Meta still has plans to "grow our workforce to ensure we focus on long term impact. They plan to halt or slow hiring for majorly mid-senior-level roles. 

The first quarter of 2022 has Meta experiencing its slowest revenue growth in years, Facebook share fell by almost 7% this last week and its profits have gone down by almost 25%! All of these have been happening right in the middle of the shift to virtual reality. With the competition so great from other social media platforms like TikTok and other challenges arising, it is no surprise that their average price-per-ad went down by 8%. Recently Zuckerberg, on a call with analysts stated that "After the start of Covid, the acceleration of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth, but we're now seeing that trend back off, based on the strong revenue growth we saw in 2021, we kicked off a number of multi-year projects to accelerate some of our longer-term investments but with our current business growth levels, we are now planning to slow the pace of some of our investments." Zuckerberg had also warned investors that Meta had plans to reduce the rate of investment because of current challenges which include the impact of the war between Russia and Ukraine among many others.

It is no news that the focus has been on the virtual reality futuristic space with Meta and Zuckerberg confirmed it on the call when he said, "We're shifting the bulk of the energy inside the company toward those high priority areas, we have a lot of awesome people here and a lot of the decisions we get to make on a day-to-day basis are; how do we direct the really talented people that are already at the company rather than always relying on just getting more and more new people from the outside." He had also stated that their long term plans to generate income from Meta various apps to fund their investments may have short-term effects on the company. 

Meta is aiming to harness the future through the metaverse and the long-term seems to be the focus amidst the challenges the company is facing currently. Zuckerberg confirmed this when he said, "Of course, our priority remains building for the long-term, so while we're currently building our plans to achieve this, it is possible that prolonged macroeconomic or business uncertainty could force us to trade off against short-term financial goals, But we remain confident in our long-term opportunities."  

It is sad for all those who got laid off before even beginning their respective positions, Meta seems to be set on long-term goals for now and is adjusting according to the various challenges they are facing.