Laid-off Meta employees vent after latest culling in ‘year of efficiency’

Meta employees caught up in Facebook’s owner’s latest round of layoffs are being fired online — with more than one gripe about getting a pink slip on maternity leave.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant this week revealed plans to lay off an additional 10,000 employees across its business – an extension of the company’s culling that began last November with nearly 11,000 cuts.

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Sarah Schneider – one of the workers who took massive cost-cutting as part of CEO Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” – had worked as a recruiter for Meta since January 2020, according to her LinkedIn account .

“Unfortunately, my maternity leave at Meta was cut short due to the brutal Meta layoffs. I’ve had a wonderful 3 years at a company with so many memories and worked with great teams and incredible people,” Schneider wrote in a viral LinkedIn post.

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“This layoff was not performance based,” she said.

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Schneider’s post revealed that she “suffered from near-fatal postpartum hemorrhage 8 hours after giving birth.”

“Though incredibly painful, I know I was kept alive for a reason. It gives me perspective that I have a purpose, and the hills and valleys of life are just that – temporary,” she wrote.

Another recruiter, Yvette Solmoreau, said she too was fired while on maternity leave after a five-year stint at META.

“This is an exceptionally hard pill to swallow as this happened during my maternity leave and, as one can imagine, I am still processing what this may mean for my family,” Solmoreau wrote on LinkedIn.

“Still, as I reflect on my time at META, I am incredibly grateful for the years I spent there and the major milestones I have achieved, both personally and professionally.”

Former senior technical recruiter Andy Allen criticized Zuckerberg’s handling of the position.

“I don’t understand how the #metal leadership miscalculated so badly that they had to lay off thousands of employees, and still want to claim they care about the people who work for them Has Mark Zuckerberg taken a pay cut?” Allen said.

Leslie Whistler, a senior recruiting manager at Meta, said she was “impressed with 70% of my colleagues in recruiting at Meta.”

“This has been a year of unusual circumstances and I am proud of how I have led my team through obscurity,” Whistler said.

Recruiter Robert Howard said he learned he was being fired early Wednesday after he lost system access.

“Woke up this morning, like many of my friends and colleagues, to find that my #meta system access had been terminated. (When 4am rolled around, I still had access, but at 5am , it was lol) Howard wrote.

Another ousted recruiter, Mary Prescott, gave a direct account of her abrupt dismissal in a Interview with Insider.

Prescott said she was “frustrated and disappointed” that Meta’s leaders took so long to address their layoff plans, despite extensive leaks about the planned cuts prior to Zuckerberg’s confirmation.

Prescott said, “Honestly, the severance is great, and there was a lot of useful information in the email, but clearly it was a very impersonal, automated email.”

“I understand that in such a large company with so many employees affected, you can’t make it so personal, but I would appreciate my manager’s email if they had that information.”

Zuckerberg confirmed the sweeping cuts this week in a memo to employees that was also published on Meta’s website.

He said affected members of Meta’s recruiting team learned their fate on Wednesday, while the cuts would affect the company’s “technical groups” at the end of April and its “business groups” at the end of May.

“Over the next few months, the organization’s leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our organizations, canceling low-priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“With low hiring, I have made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of my recruiting team,” he said.

The post has reached out to Meta for comment.