Meta’s mass layoffs have morphed into callbacks.
The parent of Facebook and Instagram has opened an “alumni portal” where recently canned employees can reapply for jobs as the social media giant reverses its headcount reduction and picks up the pace of hiring, Business Insider reported.
Meta said in May it planned to shed 10,000 employees as it moved forward with its “Year of Efficiency.” Those cuts came on top of roughly 11,000 staffers let go last year as it restructured following a massive surge in staffing during the pandemic.
By the end of June, the company’s headcount was at 71,469, it said in its quarterly report, down 18% from 87,314 people as of September 2022, before the layoffs started.
At its height, the number of workers represented a 94% leap from the 44,942 Meta employed at the end of 2019, according to its annual report from that year.
The headcount swing is apparently heading back higher again, particularly for engineering and technical roles, Business Insider said. Any worker who was laid off since November is welcome to apply for the new openings, and dozens have already been rehired, the report said, citing three people familiar with the situation.
It’s also believed that Meta hired former Twitter employees to help launch its rival “Threads” service last month, a move that sparked a threat of legal action from Twitter, now X, owner Elon Musk.
Meta’s rehiring is taking place as most of the company remains under a de facto hiring freeze and few new faces are taking business roles, the report said. But in engineering for software, hardware and AR/VR, as well as technical roles in infrastructure and data-center work, the door is open to both old and new staffers.
Laid off workers who have experience and had positive performance reviews are the most sought after, the report said, while recent graduates and interns are not seeing offers.
While some outsiders are getting spots, “the ratio of hiring ‘is 10 to one’ in favor of those who were recently laid off from Meta,” the report said, citing a person familiar with the company’s practices. Some of the returning hires are getting lower salaries, it added.