Maddie Machado joined Meta in 2021. Maddie Macho
Maddie Machado joined Meta in 2021. Maddie Macho© Provided by Business Insider
  • A former Meta talent sourcer said "there wasn't enough work" for her team, per The Independent.
  • Maddie Machado said her team was "doing nothing" due to "inefficient" recruitment processes.
  • Machado, who was fired in 2022, says Meta had "too many recruiters" and a limited talent pool.

A former Meta employee said there "wasn't enough work" to do and that her entire team were often "doing nothing", The Independent reported.

Maddie Machado, who joined as a talent sourcer in 2021, told the outlet that the Facebook owner had an "inefficient process" to recruit staff.

"I wasn't just sitting around and not doing anything for $200,000; it was a whole team of recruiters doing nothing because of an inefficient process," she said. She added that there "really wasn't enough work" for her team.

Machado's comments come as Meta began a new round of layoffs this week. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced it was cutting 11,000 jobs in November, followed by a further 10,000 in March. Insider analysis shows it's cut almost a quarter of its workforce since last year. 

The former recruiter said her team were each tasked with speaking to up to five potential hires a week, but that most couldn't reach their targets. 

"I knew that when I started – they had way too many recruiters for the little talent that's out there. How many times can you reach out to the same thousand people?" she said. 

Machado previously told Insider that she outlined the employee benefits she received at Meta on her TikTok account, in a video that's since been deleted. She included that she received an annual wellness stipend of $3,000 as a work-from-home perk before she was fired in February 2022.

Machado, who now runs her own recruitment company, shared why she was fired in a TikTok video last month. She says she handed in her resignation after a meeting with the firm's legal team about her TikTok videos. They told her the videos were a "conflict of interest" and she was fired days later. 

Machado joined Meta two weeks after a Facebook whistleblower leaked internal documents about how the platform dealt with harmful content, which she says made it "incredibly challenging" to find potential recruits: "Such revelations aren't exactly attractive when trying to headhunt candidates." 

Three months after the "fantastic" onboarding process, her team discovered that a limited talent pool "didn't want to work for Facebook", she claims.   

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.