A former Meta recruiter paid about $200,000 a year says her team 'did nothing' as there 'really wasn't enough work'

• A former Meta talent sourcer, Maddie Machado, says "there wasn't enough work" for her team.
• In The Independent's Voices section, Machado said Meta had had "too many recruiters."
• "It was a whole team of recruiters doing nothing because of an inefficient process," she said.

A former Meta employee says there "wasn't enough work" to do and her entire team was often "doing nothing" while she was at the company.

Maddie Machado, who joined as a talent sourcer in 2021, said in The Independent's Voices section that the Facebook owner had an "inefficient process" for recruiting.

"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 with Meta having begun 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 was tasked with talking to as many five potential hires a week but most on the team 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," she said. "How many times can you reach out to the same thousand people?"

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 a TikTok video last month discussing her exit from the company. She said that she handed in her resignation after a meeting in which the firm's legal team called her TikTok videos a "conflict of interest" but that she was instead 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 recruit. "Such revelations aren't exactly attractive when trying to headhunt candidates," she said in The Independent.

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

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

Correction: April 24, 2023 — An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Maddie Machado's comments in The Independent. She discussed her time at Meta directly in The Independent's Voices section, not in a reported story in The Independent.