A former recruiter for social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company, says that during her short tenure at the company, where she earned $190,000 per year, she did “nothing,” circumstances that industry experts say have been typical for big tech companies in recent years.
In a viral TikTok video, 33-year-old Madelyn Machado, who says she worked as a recruiter for Meta beginning in the fall of 2021, spent two years at the company without hiring a single employee. Flabbergasted, she said, “So you just hired more recruiters…. to not hire anybody?”
Industry experts are saying that Machado’s experience is not a unique one and that many big tech companies, particularly during the pandemic, hired way more people than what was reasonably needed to run the company.
Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told The Wall Street Journal, “They were hiring ahead of demand.”
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Out of fear that talent would be hard to come by, big tech firms snatched up talent at an unprecedented rate during the pandemic, whether they needed the head count or not, and, in part, did so to ensure their competitors couldn’t secure the talent.
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Britney Levy, another former Meta employee, also took to TikTok to express her views on the practice. “It kinda seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, “ she said, adding that, “They were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
She said that in her approximately 8-months of employment with the company she “had to fight to find work,” and received only a single assignment for her efforts.
Her time spent at Meta was dominated by meetings after meetings she said. “I mean, we were just like sitting there.”
Big tech companies are currently reaping the consequences of their binge in hiring, and are currently laying off thousands of employees.
Val Katayev, a tech entrepreneur, told the Wall Street Journal, “They hire everybody, whether they need it or not, just to have a reserve of talent. They can afford it.”
