Facebook Parent Meta Hits the Brakes on Hiring as Growth Stalls

Specifically, Meta will be halting, or in some cases slowing, hiring for more mid- to senior-level positions, according to the company. This follows a recent pause on hiring early-career engineers a few weeks back.

Like other tech giants, Meta has been a hiring juggernaut in recent years, more than doubling the size of its workforce since 2018.

At the end of the first quarter, Meta counted 77,800 full-time employees, up 28% from a year earlier, according to the company’s most recent quarterly report.

The company doesn’t have any plans for layoffs at this time, it said. Meta overshot some of its hiring goals—it hired more people in the first quarter of 2022 than it did in all of 2021—and it is adjusting accordingly, the company said.

The shift in hiring strategy comes after a string of disappointing quarters for the social-media company.

Last week, the company posted its slowest revenue growth since going public a decade ago as it navigates growing competition from the likes of TikTok and privacy headwinds for its advertising business. In February, the company said it estimated that ad-tracking changes introduced by

Apple Inc.

last year would cost it some $10 billion this year.

The company also cited the Ukraine conflict and broader macroeconomic conditions as factors for the slowdown.

The hiring strategy shift was earlier reported by Business Insider.

Meta shares climbed on the news, gaining more than 5% Wednesday.

Since February, the company’s shares have dropped more than 30%. That is equivalent to a loss of $274.6 billion in market value.

Write to Salvador Rodriguez at [email protected]