Facebook parent company Meta has begun notifying employees of a 5% workforce reduction, potentially impacting nearly 4,000 jobs in the US, Europe and Asia, even as it reportedly appears to be bolstering its engineering teams by ‘expediting recruiting’ in key areas.
According to a report by Business Insider, Meta is actively recruiting engineers, particularly those specialising in machine learning. In an internal memo in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he “decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” he noted that the company will also fill these roles later this year.
Meta to hire “many engineers” this year
The report said that Peng Fan, a Meta engineering VP, announced on the company’s internal forum, Workplace, that the company needs to “hire many engineers in 2025” for business-critical roles, especially those with machine-learning expertise.
To accelerate this process, Meta is organizing “ML Batch Day Interviews” starting February 11, aiming to conduct hundreds of interviews across various engineering specialisations. Fan called on current employees with interview training to assist in this effort.
“In an effort to expedite recruiting in these areas, we are planning ML Batch Day Interviews between February 11th – March 13th (3 batch days per week),” Fan wrote.
The company is reportedly conducting 420 software engineer interviews, 225 software engineer behavioral interviews and 50 machine-learning system design interviews.
Furthermore, a separate Workplace post from Instagram’s head of engineering, Nam Nguyen, urged interviewers to conduct at least two interviews per week to meet “evolving recruiting targets.”
“In addition to this target, we are committed to growing our interviewer pool by 20% and are reaching for an interview acceptance rate of >70%. As we continue into 2025, Interviewing is once again a top priority for Meta,” he said.