A Facebook recruiting officer wrote in an internal memo, “The entire company is currently facing a serious imbalance between talent supply and demand. This feeling is terrible.”
Author | Anna Kramer Translator | Nuclear Cola Planning | Liu Yan
Facebook encounters recruitment problems
According to an internal memo on recruitment strategies and talent challenges, Facebook apparently has not been able to find enough candidates to support engineering and technical needs. The problem of talent shortage is currently particularly serious in the Bay Area, and it has caused Facebook to be unable to achieve its goal of recruiting employees in early 2021.
According to information disclosed by Facebook to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the social giant failed to achieve its recruitment goals as early as 2019, which also made the company’s CEO Zuckerberg feel quite frustrated. He immediately decided to establish a temporary leadership team, hoping to formulate a contingency plan to solve the headache of talent shortage.
This disclosure was submitted to Congress after being edited by the legal counsel Frances Haugen. At present, the news media alliance has seen this edited version for review by Congress.
This internal memo called “Analysis of the Causes of Recruitment Difficulties” was finalized within this year. A Facebook recruiter described in detail the huge imbalance between the high demand for talent and the low supply of the engineering team that the engineering team is facing. Please see the picture below for the full text of the memorandum:
The memorandum “Analysis of the Causes of Recruitment Difficulties” submitted to Congress by the legal counsel Frances Haugen after editing
This memo specifically describes how Facebook calculates its internal recruitment needs. The company needs to successfully recruit thousands of engineers every year to complete the established product development and content production goals. The memo also pointed out that although Facebook has been interested in cultivating engineers outside the Bay Area, hiring managers are still insisting on hiring quickly locally, and there seems to be little interest in the new policy.
A Facebook spokesperson mentioned in a statement to the media, “This memo is a standard recruitment update that was released on time in May this year. It is a regular update that various companies will release regularly. We were in the earnings call yesterday. It also mentioned that Facebook had more than 68,100 full-time employees as of the end of the quarter, an increase of 20% from last year. We are still committed to expanding the company’s recruitment efforts in the United States and globally.”
Facebook is not the only one facing recruitment difficulties.
A number of surveys in the technology industry have shown that the shortage of engineers and development talents and the difficulty in recruiting have become one of the biggest concerns of all companies in the industry. And last year, the labor market in almost all industries in the United States showed tight supply.
Talent recruitment goals are difficult to complete
An unnamed leader wrote in the memo, “Since we have maximized the scope of recruitment, all of Facebook’s technology sites have been under talent pressure. The entire company is currently facing a serious imbalance between talent supply and demand. This It feels terrible. It can be said that we are going through a period of growing pains.”
According to the data published in the memo, Facebook has not been able to recruit enough IC5 and higher-level engineers in the Bay Area between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. In the first quarter of 2021, the proportion of engineers who received onboarding notices just exceeded 50% (171 out of 320), while the median in 2020 was over 65%.
The leader said frankly in the memo, “The enrollment rate of IC5 and higher engineers in the Bay Area has fallen to the level before 2020. In addition, our enrollment rate in the Seattle area is also showing signs of decline. For specific reasons , We are still working hard to investigate.”
The memo speculates that although Facebook had the opportunity to seize the opportunity to recruit talents during the outbreak of the new crown in 2020, because other companies temporarily cut hiring due to the epidemic, these competitors have now “bringing venture capital” to return and Increase again. With abundant funds, they can compete head-on with Facebook in the labor market.
The memo also mentioned that in addition to the most serious situation in the Bay Area, other Facebook engineering sites are also facing considerable pressure in their recruitment work in the first quarter of this year.
The leader also wrote, “If we have been unable to achieve the established recruitment goals, then we will not be able to smoothly launch the product development plan, at least the specific launch time will be greatly delayed. Failure to complete the engineering talent recruitment goal is definitely a big problem, Zuckerberg Grid also made it clear that he did not want the problems of 2020 to repeat themselves.”
In fact, Facebook’s internal recruitment plan in the past few years has also undergone major changes, which are intended to solve the company’s many problems that the company has failed to achieve its macro development goals. The company uses a set of formulas to calculate the number of employees required by each team, which includes the following variables: the number of managers, directors, and engineers at different levels; the turnover rate; the ratio of junior engineers to senior engineers; the interview rate of interns; and talent Development forecast.
Through this set of formulas, Facebook will set a fixed number of recruits for each team before, and then the team will fine-tune the specific levels and positioning of these engineer positions according to actual needs.
But judging from the content of the memorandum, this strategy failed miserably in 2019, because any single change would have a major impact on the overall “long-term plan”. The results show that the engineering and technical team is far from reaching the recruitment target set in 2019.
According to the memorandum, “the current core problem is that the Faecbook engineering team’s motivation to “do the right thing” (ie to cultivate more talents outside the Bay Area) is not strong enough. Many hiring managers short-sightedly believe that they can be hired in the Bay Area at any time. Talents who are sufficient to meet the current urgent needs.”
But the facts have proved that whether it is internal promotion or inter-departmental communication, efforts to solve this problem “have failed to work, but the negative effects have been one after another”, which ultimately angered Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg: I don’t want the problem to repeat itself
Ever since, “Zuckerberg made it clear that he did not want the problems of 2020 to repeat themselves.”
In 2020, related solutions will be introduced, and the new plan limits the number of local recruits for recruiting managers of each team. This move gave hiring managers a head, but it worked well at the beginning of 2020 and mid-year, and it seems to represent a successful change. The memo mentioned that the recruitment situation in London and New York during the period was quite satisfactory.
But by 2021, the team finally realized that the situation of the previous year was only an exception.
As a result, Facebook decided to increase the size of the recruitment team with the help of good business growth and talent acquisition momentum, and proposed to expand the demand for new employees in an all-round way. But it seems that overnight, all sites have encountered the problem of declining recruitment revenue and insufficient number of employees.
In the last chapter of the memorandum, “What can we do?”, the author admits that Facebook must strengthen remote talent recruitment, enrich the size of the recruitment team (but the recruitment of this part of talent is also highly competitive), and establish a short-term imbalance between supply and demand. Emergency team.
Just half a month ago, Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to help it build next-generation products such as the planned “Meta Universe”.
In addition, at the beginning of this week, Frances Haugen mentioned in the British Parliament voucher that she was pleasantly surprised by the news. “If it can really attract these 10,000 engineers, Facebook can fully play its role in security. This is really exciting.”
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