Hot AI Job Market Means Meta Is Offering Jobs Without Interviews, Zuck Emailing Candidates Himself

When the words “AI” and “workers” appear in the same news headline, the odds are that it’ll be a piece asking how long until the technology replaces real people. But news about Meta’s scramble to hire AI staff upends that notion, and then some. In its push to expand its AI effort, Meta is apparently so frantic to hire workers with the right expertise it’s trying to tempt them away from tech giant rivals, and even CEO Mark Zuckerberg is getting involved. 

Tech news site The Information heard from a handful of insiders who spilled the beans on Meta’s AI hiring tactics. Zuckerberg has been personally emailing AI researchers from Google’s DeepMind division, explaining how important AI is to the future of Meta and saying how he’s hoping the researcher and Meta will work together. Meta is also said to be skipping traditional hiring processes and directly making job offers to some new staff without interviewing them, and has suspended what the Information says is a “longstanding” company policy of not raising salaries for staff who are threatening to leave. As of yet, no news has surfaced of notable hires–but DeepMind’s AI team has been in the news recently when Microsoft hired co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to oversee its own consumer-facing AI division.

The news is a fascinating insight into a niche job market, and it highlights how quickly what was recently a fairly obscure skill set is now in high demand as the AI revolution continues.

It’s a little surprising to see Meta involved in the battle for high-level AI staff. It’s not one of the better-known AI players like OpenAI or Google, and the entire company formerly known as Facebook was rejiggered under its new brand name Meta in late 2021 to align with Zuckerberg’s urges to dominate the AR/VR “metaverse.” But in Meta’s recent earnings call, Zuckerberg made it clear that AI and the metaverse are both central to the future of the company.

He spoke of a future for Meta where it built AIs for “every creator” to use for community engagement (which doesn’t sound very “social” for a social media company), for customers to use to interact with “every business,” and that “every developer will have a state-of-the-art open source model to build with.”

Meta’s frantic effort to recruit AI-savvy staff also comes after a year when the company laid off slightly more than one in five employees, leading to soaring profits for the final quarter of 2023, with net income up 201 percent compared to the same period in 2023. What this means is that the “leaner” company, as Zuckerberg labeled it, is now ready to redirect its efforts toward an AI-centric future. The sometimes highly personalized recruiting drive is an interesting counterpoint to endless tech industry layoffs that have recently been hitting every sector, from search engines to games developers.

Some of Meta’s AI efforts are in the news right now, since Meta is introducing the ability to interact with its chatbot AI assistant feature directly into the search bar in its popular WhatsApp chat app.

Meta’s Llama 2, its flagship AI product, was also in the news for a more controversial reason, when it suffered some of the same “oversensitivity” problems that had recently plagued Google’s Gemini system. To prevent the company finding itself in a scandal, Llama 2 was engineered to not discuss overly difficult topics with users, but apparently this was severely hampering its ability to answer basic questions. 

More interestingly, Meta is also reportedly working on developing AI “agents.” Unlike chatbot AIs and the crop of image and video-generating AIs that are popular right now–systems that are mostly “passive” because they merely output data on command–AI agents are actually able to act on your behalf. These systems have potential business uses by the ton, including taking over some more mundane office tasks like organizing everyone’s calendars. Whether or not business users will prefer to use AI products from Zuckerberg’s social media/advertising business instead of tools from more familiar brands like Google, only time will tell.