https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employees-are-more-willing-to-leave-exodus-recruiters-say-2021-11 A vertical stack of three evenly spaced horizontal lines. A magnifying glass. It indicates, "Click to perform a search". The word "Insider". 0 An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log in An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Subscribe Subscribe * The word Business * The word Life * The word News * The word Reviews A magnifying glass. It indicates, "Click to perform a search". The word "Insider". Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. 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It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Profile Newsletters FAQs Subscription Log out US Markets Loading... H M S In the news It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE Subscribe Subscribe Premium Home It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Tech Tech recruiters struggled for years to get people to leave Facebook. Now they say there's an exodus building, and the company is having more trouble recruiting, too. Kali Hays 2021-11-11T10:00:00Z The letter F. An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email. A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting. Twitter The word "in". LinkedIn A stylized letter F. Flipboard An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url. Copy Link Workers in front of Facebook headquarters pull off cover of the old "thumbs up" sign to reveal the new Meta logo A Meta sign at its headquarters. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. * Facebook, aka Meta, is seeing employees from executives to engineers look elsewhere for tech jobs. * Recruiters see an "exodus" building after struggling for years to lure people away from the company. * "There's a scummy feeling you have about the company that you never had before," one person said. More Facebook employees are leaving, or looking to exit the company, partly due to a series of scandals that has dented the social-media giant's reputation, according to tech recruiters and other industry sources. Internal documents released recently by lawyers for whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew it played a role in a number of harms but dismissed warnings from employees. That followed years of other problems, including waning user growth, regulatory investigations, foreign manipulation of the platform, and heavy fines . Now a rising number of Facebook staff have had enough and are looking elsewhere in a competitive tech job market in which well-funded startups and wealthy rivals pitch jobs that are potentially more rewarding and less controversial. "For years, the emails, calls, and messages you'd send to someone at Facebook were just ignored," said Greg Selker, head of the North America technology practice at the executive recruiting firm Stanton Chase. "This year, not only are they responding, but people are reaching out saying, 'Hey, I'm thinking about a move and what's next. We should talk.'" Selker said he's chatting with Facebook employees on a weekly basis and getting interest from vice presidents, group directors, and directors. "We're starting to see an exodus to a certain degree," he added. Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and founder of Build Talent, is seeing more movement out of the company, too. "For a long time it was hard to get people out of Facebook," he said. "People are coming loose now, and it's been building for a while." Other recruiters recounted similar experiences to Insider, but some asked not to be identified discussing such a sensitive topic. A company spokesperson noted Facebook's headcount is up 20% over last year, and added the company remains "committed to expanding our hiring efforts in the US and globally." Headhunters also have an interest in people switching jobs, so the number of exits from the company may end up being be less than they expect. Technology companies thrive or wither based on their ability to recruit engineers and other talented workers. Without a steady stream of new, knowledgeable staff, growth plans can stall, new projects can flop, and crucial product updates can be delayed, giving rivals a valuable edge. For most of the company's 17-year existence, Facebook has been rated one of the best places to work, with generous benefits, perks, and compensation. Social media was considered a revolutionary way to "connect the world," so people could feel good about being there, even if the workload was intense and, depending on the project, questions from Mark Zuckerberg were never far away. Employees' feelings about working at the company have deteriorated, though. In 2018, Facebook came first in Glassdoor's rankings of the best places in the US to work. This year, it fell to 11th place, behind the likes of Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft. Employee posts on Facebook's internal Workplace platform show some staff warning about burnout, especially during 2020 when the company instituted several "surges," or periods of "intense refocusing and doubling down on a set of products, policies and processes." One employee wrote last year that "surge culture is a failure state," noting these extra busy times can cause "burnout and regrettable attrition." Facebook's brand has also taken a hit. Interbrand's annual ranking put Facebook in 15th place this year, down from a peak of eighth in 2017. The estimated valuation of the Facebook brand fell to $36 billion from $48 billion in that time, while Amazon's brand value surged roughly fourfold to almost $250 billion. "There's a scummy feeling you have about the company that you never had before," an experienced tech industry recruiter said. The pay is high, but employees are still being lured away or are considering leaving, sometimes worried about the potential reputational damage of staying at Facebook. For others, it's the promise of more cutting-edge, exciting work elsewhere, recruiters and others say. "The clients we have that are more mission oriented get higher response rates," Guardado said. "Increasingly, people say they want to feel good about the work they're doing, and I think the decisions of executive management at Facebook are making it hard to do that." A former engineer who left last year told Insider he was simply tired of the company, saying, "Facebook seems like old news." On top of waning interest in the work, he noted, political and public sentiment likely leads others to consider the impact on future job opportunities. Another engineer at the company posted about their frustration this year on Blind, an anonymous work-focused social network that requires users to verify their employer using valid email addresses. The person ran a poll to help them decide between taking an offer from Stripe or Netflix . "I'm not enjoying my work at Facebook that's why I'm looking to leave," the employee wrote. Out of more than 1,100 votes, the person was urged to take the Netflix job, where he said he was being offered $580,000 a year. "We think we can have anyone we want in their engineering department," said Andy Price, a longtime tech recruiter and founder of Artisanal Talent. "They have engineers leaving in droves. And why wouldn't they? You make a little more money at Facebook, sure, but the people we're interacting with, engineering leaders, they want to build interesting companies. They say, 'I was doing interesting things at Facebook, but now it's all about serving the ad business. Yawn.'" Several high-level employees, including Fidji Simo, Carolyn Everson, Jay Parikh, and David Fischer, have departed recently. In September, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer announced plans to leave. Fidji Simo [618c543034] Fidji Simo Facebook Even before Haugen sparked the latest crisis in October, Facebook was struggling to recruit largely due to a tight job market, according to internal documents from her disclosures that were reported by Protocol. "We are experiencing growing pains," a company leader wrote this year in a memo. In the first quarter, only half of the job offers Facebook made for positions in the Bay Area were accepted, a 15% drop from its 2020 acceptance rate, they noted. One former employee who has been relatively outspoken is Samidh Chakrabarti, who headed the civic-integrity team for several years before leaving in September. In a Twitter thread soon after, Chakrabarti analyzed Facebook's plan to build a metaverse and criticized what he described as a growth-at-all-costs mentality and overreliance on metrics. "Employees of conscience must also do their part," he wrote in one tweet. "Don't let FB off the hook for its social media integrity failures. Put food on your table w/out blood on your hands." Still, he said Facebook's pivot to VR and AR gives the company another chance to build technology more responsibly. "I'm hopeful, but it will require them to rewire their whole culture," he wrote. Chakrabarti also suggested the Meta rebranding and new focus will improve recruiting efforts. Engineers might be invigorated by working on new metaverse projects, instead of tweaking existing algorithms. A recent survey conducted by Blind found that of nearly 1,200 Facebook employees, 84% supported the corporate name change to Meta as a "good business decision." Staff were also optimistic about plans to build a metaverse, according to the poll. This "won't neutralize critics, but could really really help with recruiting," Chakrabarti wrote. "That's the real objective here." Are you a Facebook employee with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com or through secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267. Reach out using a non-work device. Twitter DM at @hayskali. Check out Insider's source guide for other suggestions on how to share information securely. A picture of a switch and lightbulb [light-swit] Sign up for notifications from Insider! 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