In a Facebook post yesterday, it was announced that Meta is eliminating another 10,000 jobs.
They are also implementing a hiring freeze.
CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has said the cuts will be “tough”, and form part of a “year of restructuring,” as he attempts to regain control over the company’s finances.
These actions are part of Meta’s “Year of Efficiency.”
These job cuts come just months after 11,000 employees were laid off in early November last year. This was a reduction of about 13 percent of its workforce.
It marks the second round of job cuts in the last four months.
In the Facebook post, Zuckerberg comments on the benefits that making the job cuts have provided: “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”
The economic climate
Zuckerberg also cites the current economic climate as a reason for the job cuts. Speaking of the “new economic reality,” he writes that “[h]igher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased reregulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation.”
As a result, reducing the headcount is crucial to ensure success, Zuckerberg claims.
Laura Baldwin, President at O’Reilly, says:
“It’s easy to get caught up in the news of the day, especially with so much coverage over tech layoffs recently. I believe tech companies are downsizing right now because their pace of hiring was too fast in the last few years and in order to hire during a very tight labour market, they overpaid for talent. The annualised cost of those decisions becomes very apparent and unsustainable, forcing those companies to reset.
“Meta, Salesforce, Tesla, Robinhood, Amazon, and many more have all recently announced layoffs. When there aren’t as many new jobs to jump to, employees tend to want to stay in their current positions. But that doesn’t mean you can stop re-recruiting and investing in your people. Quite the opposite.
“As a leader, I think it’s important to focus on the long term, and with the transformation that’s taking place in how people work coupled with technological disruption through generative AI, there’s likely to be a great deal of opportunity. Like all leaders, I’m managing to meet the moment which means proceeding with caution over the next six months, but if I look farther out, I’m optimistic that the change the world is undergoing right now will present a great deal of opportunities for the leaders that plan for it and position their businesses and teams for the future.”
Amelia Brand is the Editor for HRreview, and host of the HR in Review podcast series. With a Master’s degree in Legal and Political Theory, her particular interests within HR include employment law, DE&I, and wellbeing within the workplace. Prior to working with HRreview, Amelia was Sub-Editor of a magazine, and Editor of the Environmental Justice Project at University College London, writing and overseeing articles into UCL’s weekly newsletter. Her previous academic work has focused on philosophy, politics and law, with a special focus on how artificial intelligence will feature in the future.
