Meta starts cutting jobs, fires over 1,500 employees in HR and other departments

By Ankita GargMeta has just announced the layoff of 10,000 employees and it has now begun the process. The tech company has fired over 1,500 workers in recruiting and Human Resources (HR) departments, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The same source also reported that Meta could take a few more years to finish restructuring the company, which means that more employees could get removed in the coming time. This is exclusive of the 10,000 employees that the tech company has announced to eliminate.

The company also sacked employees in November 2022, citing that the people who haven’t performed well have been fired. Now in an email sent to employees, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the fresh round of layoff is being done because of financial issues and the economic downturn.

The tech company has also given reasons that it over-hired in the recent past when it was witnessing a good level of growth and to keep up with the competition. But now that its growth has slowed down and revenue business has also reduced, Meta decided to remove employees and focus on more how efficiently it can work and get better results.

In an email, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company won’t be removing all the employees all at once. He asserted that job cuts in engineering and other departments will be done in April. The business groups will be impacted by layoff in late May. He also mentioned that once the layoff process is completed, Meta will resume hiring and transfer freezes in groups, which might come as a surprise to many, because the tech company has so far laid-off 12,500, and 8,500 more employees will be eliminated in the coming months.

For the first set of layoffs, Meta promised to offer severance pay to the impacted ones. But, there is no confirmation on whether the latest set of laid-off employees will be getting a compensation package. Zuckerberg did confirm that the company plans to remove 5,000 open roles.

“In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,” the CEO wrote in the email.