Meta has internal blacklists of employees who are ineligible for reemployment. Former company managers say it is almost impossible to get off the list and an employee might end up there simply because their boss didn't like them.
Meta has internal blacklists of employees who are ineligible for reemployment. Former company managers say it is almost impossible to get off the list and an employee might end up there simply because their boss didn't like them.
The senior engineer who was laid off in 2022 had worked at Meta for more than 4 years. He received high performance reviews and was promoted to a senior technical position a year before his layoff. Then in 2022, some of the 10,000 laid off employees received emails from managers saying, among other things, that it was simply a business decision and that the IT managers wanted them back on their teams. So the IT worker thought he would eventually be able to get a job back at the company, Business Insider writes .
After applying for nearly 20 jobs in the year after being fired, the engineer noticed a pattern: The employees would express interest in bringing him back and schedule a screening call with a recruiter—the first step in Meta’s multi-step hiring process. Then the recruiters would disappear from view.
Frustrated, the engineer asked one of the HR managers what was going on. He was told that Meta's recruiting team had forbidden the manager from contacting the engineer because they were deemed "unsuitable for rehiring."
This is not an isolated incident. Five sources confirmed to Business Insider that internal lists exist that bar certain former employees from returning to the company. The sources included two former managers who said that even those with good performance records may not be rehired. Such lists are not illegal, but they are quite unusual.
Former employees and managers confirmed that Meta uses several systems to track ineligibility for rehiring, including a “permanent exit” flag and a “do not rehire” flag, although the exact mechanisms and number of affected employees remain unclear.
While the reporters were unable to review a single, comprehensive list, the numerous internal communications they analyzed showed that managers face systemic barriers when trying to reinstate certain former employees.
Former Meta employees from various departments, whose names are not being disclosed due to the sensitivity of the issue, said they learned about their ban from third-party contractors, not from the company itself.
Managers who spoke to BI say the bans don't just apply to these clear-cut cases: Supervisors often have broad authority to add names to these lists without documented performance issues.
“If a manager didn’t like you, it was easy to put someone on the list,” said one former manager. “There are clear criteria for when someone is marked as ineligible for rehiring, and they apply them to all employees who are leaving, and there are checks and balances in the process so that one manager can’t unilaterally mark someone as ineligible without support.”
“When terminating, we determine the reason for the employee’s exit — policy violation, termination, voluntary resignation, etc. — and this, along with the last rating before termination and any other recent performance signals, determines whether the employee is eligible for rehiring or not,” a Meta representative told BI.
However, one former manager said that he and other managers at the company could add people to the lists by “simply filling out a form” and “specifying any real problem.” They told BI that “in a matter of minutes, someone could be marked as ‘not to be missed.’”
Meta's practice seems unusual even in the competitive tech industry. According to industry veterans familiar with the hiring system, barring former employees who did not violate the rules from rehiring them without direct notification is not standard practice at other large tech companies.
“I’ve actually never heard of a company putting a ‘do not rehire’ flag on former employees because if the employee was decent or did a good job, you’re more likely to hire someone who really knows your company and your culture than someone else,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of human resources from 2006 to 2016. He added that he’s never seen such a practice formally enforced at any major corporation.
The engineer mentioned earlier contacted the company's human resources lawyer, who stated that there were no personnel violations that could be grounds for restricting hiring,
When the engineer asked for an explanation about the recruitment block, Meta's lawyer replied that they could not comment.
In a follow-up email to Meta’s HR department, the engineer asked the company to confirm whether he was on the blocked candidate list and, if so, to explain why. The company responded that it couldn’t provide a definitive answer and that they could try applying for open positions on Meta’s career site.
A director at one unit said there have been similar cases where current Meta employees who were given a month to find new internal roles after their programs were canceled found they were blocked from transferring because they ended up on a list.
Another HR manager said they encountered a mechanism that went beyond the usual recruiting tools. And they haven't seen anyone successfully get off the list and be able to interview again at the company.
An employment lawyer says that termination notices can include provisions that prohibit former employees from reapplying. But the fired engineer did not have such wording.
"This is the worst company I've ever worked for," says the engineer. "But they also pay the best. If I could work there for a couple more years and get rich, I would."
