Meta Platforms powner of Facebook and Instagram, announced that will freeze hiring and restructure some teams in an effort to cut costs and shift priorities.
Executive Director, Mark Zuckerbergannounced the social media company’s freeze during a weekly question-and-answer session with employees, according to a person present.
He added that the company would reduce budgets on most teams, even in teams that are growing, and that individual teams will solve chow to handle changes in staff, whether that means not filling roles left by employees, shifting people to other teams, or working to “manage people who aren’t succeeding,” according to reviews reviewed by Bloomberg.
“I was hoping the economy would have stabilized more clearly now, but from what we’re seeing, it doesn’t look like it has yet, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” Zuckerberg said. A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
Meta’s new cost cuts and hiring freeze represent its starkest admission that the ad revenue growth is slowing down, amid growing competition for users’ attention. Meta said earlier this year that it planned to reduce hiring for some management positions and had postponed giving full – time jobs to summer interns . The freeze was necessary because “we want to make sure we don’t add people to teams that we don’t expect to have roles in next year,” Zuckerberg explained.
Zuckerberg had warned in July that Meta would “steadily reduce headcount growth” and that “a lot of teams will be downsized so we can shift energy to other areas.” Internal priorities include Reels, Meta’s TikTok competitor, and Zuckerberg’s futuristic plan for the internet, known as the metaverse. Meta had more than 83,500 employees as of June 30 and added 5,700 new hires in the second quarter. Zuckerberg said the company would be “somewhat smaller” by the end of 2023.
“For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew rapidly every year, and then most recently our revenue was flat or slightly down for the first time,” he told staff on Thursday.
During its first-quarter earnings call, the company said annual expenses would be about $3 billion lower than initially projected, cutting an estimated range that had reached $95 billion. In earlier moves to cut spending, a dual-camera watch the company was building to compete with the Apple Watch was shut down.