Meta is planning to fire 10000 of its employees in its second round of layoffs. Additionally, the company will close around 5000 job postings without hiring for the posted roles. This new development comes only a few months after Meta sacked 11000 of its workforce and went on a hiring freeze.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a Facebook post on Tuesday, claiming that such a move was necessary and was the only to increase the overall efficiency of the company’s workforce. Zuckerberg added that the decision comes in the hopes of making 2024 the “year of efficiency” for the company.
Table of Contents
Mass cut-offs are happening across all sectors as companies slip back to pre-covid working conditions
Post-covid times have already seen a constant wave of job cutoffs by major companies around the world. Out of all the companies, tech companies have been the number sector to fire huge amounts of their workforce and enforce a hiring freeze.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft have reduced their workforce considerably since the peak of work from home schedule during covid-19.
A lot is being said about major companies firing employees due to fear of a looming recession. Although a part of the reason why these major companies are firing employees on a large scale and going on a hiring freeze, anticipation of recession is not the only reason behind such mass firing.
One of the other major reasons behind sacking the employees is COVID-19 overhiring. During COVID-19, a lot of companies, especially tech companies, needed to increase their employee headcount due to a new way of working, i.e. working from home.
Due to tough conditions and lockdowns, the majority of the population had to start working from home which led to a huge amount of people suddenly relying heavily on the services provided by these tech companies.
In order to incorporate new changes and develop better user interfaces for their platforms, a lot of these companies started hiring a huge number of employees.
Now that people are resuming pre-covid work environment, the need for this amount of employees is dying and companies have started reducing their workforce to pre-covid levels.
Meta planning to flatten its organizational structure and focus only on high-priority projects
Only six months ago, Meta had fired 11000 of its employees, reducing its workforce by 13 percent. The new round of layoffs, which will fire around 10000 employees, will reduce Meta’s workforce by another 15 percent.
Zuckerberg, in his Facebook post, said that the layoffs are part of a much larger plan of restructuring the whole company. Meta, in 2024, will be focusing on flattening its organizational structure, canceling low-priority projects and converging the company’s focus on high-priority projects, and reducing its hiring rate, which is already in effect considering that the company closed 5000 job openings.
Mark Zuckerberg, in a message to staff, said that we live in a new economic reality and that we should be prepared for the possibility that this new economic situation is going to continue for many years.
As a result of this latest move, Meta is expected to cut company costs by $5 billion in 2024.
