Many people laid off by Meta over the past several months are getting offers to rejoin the company.
In recent weeks, the company formerly known as Facebook has slowly started to pick up the pace of hiring, particularly for engineering and technical roles. Any worker who was laid off from Meta since November has been allowed to reapply for available jobs, typically through a specific "alumni portal."
The company shed 25% of its workforce in multiple rounds of cuts that ended in May. Now, dozens of those workers have been rehired, mostly since June, according to three people familiar with the company. Meta declined to comment for this story.
Most of Meta remains in a de facto hiring freeze, with head count allocation and hiring capacity reduced for the foreseeable future, in line with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency." Still, the company has quietly picked up hiring in certain areas. Meta is seeing improvements in its all-important advertising business as it's been retaining more users and even successfully launched a Twitter rival with Threads on Instagram, all of which pleased investors.
There are hundreds of available roles, mainly in engineering for software, hardware, and AR/VR work, as well as mostly technical roles in infrastructure and data-center work. Little hiring appears to be happening in business roles, an area of the company impacted by the most recent round of layoffs, one of the people familiar said. Most of the open roles are for individual-contributor-level work, as Meta has dramatically reduced its manager ranks.
Meta is seeking people with more experience and hiring fewer recent graduates and interns, another of the people familiar said. People who were laid off at higher levels of engineering and had good performance reviews are being rehired most frequently.
The company is recruiting some outside candidates as well, and those laid off must undergo a full interview process and compete against outsiders. Still, the ratio of hiring "is 10 to one" in favor of those who were recently laid off from Meta, another person familiar said.
The move to rehire some of the 20,000-plus Meta workers who were let go is reminiscent of what Elon Musk did in his first weeks of running Twitter. In Musk's case, he attempted to rehire people he'd laid off or fired for the same roles, realizing only after they were gone that they had the skills and experience Twitter needed. At Meta, many people are being rehired for jobs they did not previously hold, sometimes at a lower salary or position, the people familiar said.
One person who was rehired at Meta said he accepted a roughly 10% pay cut in total compensation, despite being hired at the same level as his previous job. But the person expects to hit their previous compensation within a year, given Meta's stock price is on the rise.
Others aren't as accepting of Meta's methods. Another person who was laid off and is going through the rehiring process said they recently saw a posting for their former job, but as a contractor position paying 20% less than their previous salary.
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