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

Meta employees caught in the Facebook owner’s latest round of layoffs are venting online — with more than one griping about getting a pink slip while out on maternity leave.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant revealed plans this week to lay off an additional 10,000 employees across its business — expanding a companywide culling that began with roughly 11,000 cuts last November.

Sara Schneider — one of the workers axed in a massive cost-cutting push 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 was cut short at Meta due to the brutal Meta Layoffs. I spent an amazing 3 years at a company that had so many memories and worked with the best teams and incredible people,” Schneider wrote in a viral LinkedIn post.

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

Schneider’s post revealed that she had “suffered from an almost fatal post-partum hemorrhage 8 hours after giving birth.”

“Although incredibly traumatic, 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, Yevette Solmoro, said she was also laid off while on maternity leave after a five-year stint at Meta.

“It’s an exceptionally hard pill to swallow given that this happened during my maternity leave so as one can imagine, I’m still processing what this might mean for my family,” Solmoro wrote on LinkedIn.

“Nonetheless, as I reflect on my time at Meta, I’m incredibly grateful for the years spent there and to have achieved major milestones both personally and professionally,” she added.

Former senior technical recruiter Andi Allen blasted Zuckerberg over his handling of the situation.

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

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

“It has been a year of unusual circumstances and I am proud of how I have lead my team through the ambiguity,” Whisler said.

Recruiter Robert Howard said he found out he was being laid off after losing system access early Wednesday.

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

Another ousted recruiter, Mary Prescott, gave a firsthand account of her abrupt dismissal in an interview with Insider.

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

“The severance is pretty good, honestly, and there was a lot of helpful information in the email, but clearly it was a very impersonal, automated email,” Prescott said.

“I understand you can’t make it that personal in such a big company with so many workers being affected, but I would have appreciated an email from my manager if he had had that information,” she added.

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

He noted the impacted members of Meta’s recruiting team learned their fates on Wednesday, while the cuts would hit the company’s “tech groups” in late April and its “business groups” in late May.

“Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team,” he added.

The Post has reached out to Meta for comment.