Now is an 'opportune' time to land a job at Facebook, one of the company's top recruiters says
- After two days of grueling testimony to Congress by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg one thing is clear: there's a dark cloud hanging over Facebook right now.
- The company is still hiring like mad and a Facebook recruiting exec says applying for jobs now during this 'challenging time' will impress recruiters.
- Facebook is still a top-rated employer with thousands of open jobs.
- Interestingly recruiters aren't as focused on hiring the thousands of new content moderators CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised.
While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was getting publicly grilled by Congress this week, Business Insider was on the phone with Liz Wamai, Facebook's Recruiting Director of Global Operations.
Facebook has always been known as a fantastic place to work, ranking No. 1 on Glassdoor's 2018 list, thanks to high pay, benefits, over-the-top perks, interesting work and growth potential.
But the scandals embroiling the company has put a cloud over the company: everything from the threat of regulation, to the threat of slowed growth, decreased revenues and a falling share price from possible changes to its business models. Facebook's stock is still down about 11% from its level before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
That scandal involved Facebook admitting that data on 87 million of its users was harvested and sold, then used in service of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaigns. This is on top of accusations that Facebook sneakily collects data on you for its own advertising purposes and contributes to app addiction and feelings of depression.
So, if there's a silver lining in this, it's this: if you've always dreamed of working at Facebook, now might be a particularly good time to apply.
"I personally think challenging times are a very good way of filtering who is really interested and committed to who we are and what our mission is, and who is interested in solving some of the problems Facebook is tackling," Wamai told Business Insider. "This could be an opportune time [to apply]."
Content moderators, not so much
Wamai has been at Facebook for two years and helped the company grow its headcount from a little over 17,000 people in 2016 to over 25,000 today.
She's also looking for communications, legal, HR and finance pros, she said.
Interestingly, one area that she's not so concerned with: content managers.
This even though Zuckerberg promised to hire thousands of people this year to help Facebook review and remove dangerous content.
Facebook says it will double the team to 20,000 people employed in the role by year's end, from the 10,000 people doing content moderation in October, 2017.
But content moderation jobs tend to be contract workers and Wamai confirmed to us that many of the new hires will be contractors employed by Facebook's existing contract-work vendors. There will be some new full-time Facebook positions open, but she declined to say how many. We found only 15 jobs mentioning the Trust and Safety team currently on Facebook's job site.
How to nab that interview
To find those people for those many open engineering and business roles, Wamai and her team are out in force, she said. They are doing career recruitment events and scouring LinkedIn, she said.
In fact, Wamai was poached from her former job in HR at Bloomberg, first approached by a Facebook recruiter on LinkedIn. "I didn't have a tech background," she said. "I thought it was spam. It turned out to be a real opportunity."
Besides spiffing up your LinkedIn profile, some of those tips include applying for internship programs such as Facebook University.
Those with more experience should look for ways to meet and network with existing Facebook employees, she advised, and come to a recruiters' attention through an introduction.
But she also stressed that applying for a job online could work, too. "I think it's a concern when applying on our website that it's a black hole," she says. But she promises that HR has dedicated staff looking at applications that come in the door that way, too.