Going forward, getting a job at Meta and keeping it will remain tough.
Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, said Thursday during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call that 2023's "Year of Efficiency" was so successful for the company that a "leaner" operating structure will be "a permanent part of how we operate going forward."
Since the fall of 2022, Meta has conducted two rounds of mass layoffs, shedding thousands of employees, or 22% of its overall headcount, in a stark turnaround from a hiring surge in prior years. Its stock rose to a new all-time high on Thursday, hitting over $450 per share in after-hours trading.
While Meta said it has "completed" layoffs from 2023, Zuckerberg is still applying his new efficiency mentality. Already this year, the company has eliminated a management role at Instagram and intends to do the same for other organizations, telling affected employees they can reapply and reinterview for a limited number of already available roles — or else they will be laid off, as Business Insider reported.
Meta will also continue to squeeze head count and hiring, Zuckerberg said. Despite Meta's success in growing revenue, profitability, and cutting costs over the last year, hiring plans going forward are "relatively minimal, compared to what we would have done historically," Zuckerberg said.
Meta will add new people and some new roles this year, working through a "recruiting backlog," as Zuckerberg put it, while focusing on hiring workers with higher levels of experience and technical expertise.
"I sort of expect that, for the next period of time going forward, even beyond 2024, my operating assumption is that we will also try to keep it relatively minimal," Zuckerberg said. "Until we reach a point where we're just really underwater on our ability to execute, I kind of want to keep things lean because I think that's the right thing for us to do culturally."
Zuckerberg noted that part of his motivation to keep head count and related costs lower is his desire to give Meta "the ability to go through what is a somewhat unpredictable and volatile period over the next five or 10 years."
"In the near term, maybe it makes you go a little bit faster, but over the long term, the discipline to kind of hold things to a more streamlined level actually improves the overall company performance," Zuckerberg said.
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