Freezing Hiring Plans, Restructuring Will Happen Within Teams: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Tells Employees

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has told its employees that it is freezing hiring plans and also warned them of restructuring some groups within the company.

Zuckerberg announced the hiring freeze during a weekly Q&A session with its employees.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has told its employees that it is freezing hiring plans and also warned them of restructuring some groups within the company, the media has reported. This comes after almost 10 years of explosive growth at the company.

According to a report by news agency Bloomberg, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the hiring freeze during a weekly Q&A session with its employees.

In what would be the first major budget cut since the founding of Facebook in 2004, Zuckerberg said the company will freeze hiring and restructure some teams to trim expenses and realign priorities. Meta will likely be smaller in 2023 than it was this year, he was quoted as saying by the Bloomberg report.

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."

Earlier in May, Zuckerberg had announced a hiring freeze affecting certain segments of Meta. However, he has now expanded the hiring freeze across departments and verticals.

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 plans to cut costs by at least 10 per cent in the coming months and has put out more and more workers whose jobs are being eliminated on its traditional "30-day list", according to previous reports.

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. The Zuckerberg-run company had 83,553 employees at the end of the second quarter this year.

As Big Tech companies lay off employees and freeze new hirings, Zuckerberg said in July that the company's plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. 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".