This is Why Facebook is Planning to Cut Back on Hiring

As revenue growth slows down for social media giant Facebook and inflation concerns increase, the company is aiming to reduce hiring.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company sees challenges ahead because of Apple’s privacy changes, the war in Ukraine and broad macroeconomic shifts.

The company announced plans to stop or slow the pace of adding midlevel and senior people.

“We regularly re-evaluate our talent pipeline according to our business needs and in light of the expense guidance given for this earnings period, we are slowing its growth accordingly,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC in an email on Wednesday. “However, we will continue to grow our workforce to ensure we focus on long-term impact.”

Last week Meta reported earnings and offered an outlook of a potential year-over-year revenue drop in the second quarter. CFO David Wehner highlighted several issues facing the company, and said expenses for the year would be between $87 billion and $92 billion. This is a drop from a previous forecast of $90 billion to $95 billion.

According to a source familiar with Meta’s plans, the company aims to stop or slow hiring for most midlevel and senior-level roles, after holding off on adding entry-level engineers in recent weeks, according to a person familiar the company’s plans. Recruiters have started pausing their efforts to fill certain roles, said the person.

Insider reported on the plans earlier, citing a memo from Wehner to employees.

“We experienced a further deceleration in growth following the start of the Ukraine war due to the loss of revenue in Russia as well as a reduction in advertising demand both within Europe and outside the region,” Wehner said on last week’s earnings call. “We believe the war introduced further volatility into an already uncertain macroeconomic landscape for advertisers.”

Wehner reiterated to investors that privacy changes Apple instituted on its iOS devices last year will hurt growth. The company had previously predicted the move would reduce revenue this year by $10 billion.

Facebook shares are down over 30% for the year.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.