Cringe Factor: Facebook Has to Pay More to Hire Top Talent Due to Negative Reputation

According to a recent report, Facebook’s reputation has been so damaged by its various scandals and issues that the company is forced to pay more to hire and retain workers.

Business Insider reports that due to Facebook’s various scandals and issues over the past few years, the company is being forced to constantly increase compensation packages designed to hire and retain workers. Facebook has always recruited aggressively, but the company’s poor public image has meant that the tech giant is now being forced to outbid other tech giants like Google. The energy energy swirling around Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg has been described as a “brand tax.”

Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent, commented: “One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more. They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on.”

Facebook currently has 4,300 open jobs and has reportedly suffered from decreasing rates of acceptance for its job offers, according to internal documents. Facebook has also experienced dozens of high-level executives abandon the company this year.

In February, Deborah Liu, formerly the head of Facebook Marketplace, left the company to become the CEO of Ancestry.com. David Fischer, who acted as Facebook’s chief revenue officer, announced that he was leaving in March, and Kevin Weil who co-founded Facebook’s Novi cryptocurrency division also revealed that he was leaving the company.

In June, Facebook’s former ads chief Carolyn Everson announced that she would be leaving the company and later joined the grocery delivery app Instacart. Taking over as Instacart CEO is Fidji Simo, who left his position as the head of the Facebook app to join the delivery upstart.

In August, Mark D’Arcy stepped down from his role at Facebook as chief creative officer. In September, technology chief Mike Schroepfer announced his plans to leave. And in November, David Marcus, the head of cryptocurrency plans, announced that he would also be leaving.

One former Oculus engineer who left last year said that Facebook could now be seen as a “black mark” on someone’s career. Zuhayeer Musa, the cofounder of the platform Levels.fyi, which collects salary data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures, noted that for employees who stick around at the firm, base pay and stock options have increased by a “sizable” amount in 2021.

In the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer — referred to as an E5 — was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. The median pay for a level E4 engineer jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same time period.

Read more at Business Insider here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com