Facebook Parent Meta, Google Quietly Reduce Jobs

Two of the world’s largest tech companies have begun to quietly eliminate jobs as they endeavor to cut costs.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has begun reorganizing departments and giving impacted employees a limited time to apply for other in-house positions, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (Sept. 21), citing unnamed sources.

Such a move manages to cut staff without resorting to mass layoffs, but these reductions could be the set-up to a wider series of cuts as Meta looks to lower costs by 10%, according to the report. Some savings will come from reducing overhead and consulting budgets, but most will come from job cuts.

Reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson referred PYMNTS to remarks by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a recent earnings call.

“Our plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year,” the CEO said. “Many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas, and I wanted to give our leaders the ability to decide within their teams where to double down, where to backfill attrition, and where to restructure teams while minimizing thrash to the long-term initiatives.”

Zuckerberg added that he expected the company to “get more done with fewer resources,” and that past periods of challenge had been “transformational for our company.”

See also: Meta Vows ‘Leaner, Meaner’ Operation as Business Climate Chills

Meanwhile, Google told employees at its startup incubator Area 120 in July that they would need to find new positions within the company within 90 days. Google was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.

Read more: Google Starts a 2-Week Hiring Freeze

Google announced in July it was pausing hiring for two weeks and was slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year in anticipation of a recession.

“We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized staffing requests for the next three months,” Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan wrote in a memo to employees.