Meta reportedly maintains secretive lists of former employees who are prohibited from returning to the company. Some who have reapplied were even courted by their former managers, only to be ghosted after recruiters found they were on a mysterious “ineligible for rehire” list. Former employees are not told when they are added to such lists; some only learned about it after cajoling recruiters for information.

Meta conducted mass layoffs in 2022 and 2023, letting go of tens of thousands of employees in successive waves in order to make the company leaner and more efficient. Some former employees told Business Insider they reapplied not because they like Meta but because the pay was good. “It’s the worst company I’ve ever worked for,” one said. “But they also pay the best. If I could get in there for a couple more years and make bank, I would do it.”

Unfortunately, however, at least dozens of these individuals have been iced out during the application process, even if they had met or exceeded expectations during their earlier tenure and were not dismissed for any wrongdoing. Apparently, former employees can be added to these lists with little effort; when an employee is off-boarded, an email asks them to indicate whether the employee is hireable again in the future. It is possible that employees were added just because someone did not like them, or maybe Meta has simply increased its standards. Meta, for its part, insists there are checks and balances in place concerning who gets added.

From Business Insider:

Another director, who was actively trying to rehire the senior engineer, expressed frustration about the block and said that it was preventing them from rehiring multiple people they hoped to recruit.

In an email viewed by BI, a hiring manager expressed frustration that they couldn’t figure out why someone they wanted to rehire had ended up on a block list. It seemed, they said, that they were running into a mechanism outside normal recruiting tools. They wrote that they had not seen anyone successfully get off a list and be able to interview at the company again.

Human resources experts quoted in the story said it is unusual for large companies to maintain such lists for former employees who committed no policy violations. Lazlo Bock, Google’s head of people operations for ten years, said the blocklist practice is “very, very rare.” He went on to add, “I’ve actually never heard of a company having a ‘do not rehire’ designation for former employees, because if an employee was a decent or good performer, you’d much rather hire somebody who actually knows your company and culture than somebody else.”

A Meta employee speaking to Gizmodo under the condition of anonymity said they do not believe the lists are unusual, and have seen similar activity at another major tech company where they previously worked. The employee posited former employees let go during Meta’s mass layoffs that now find themselves on the do-not-rehire list may have been in reality fired even though it was framed as a restructuring-based layoff. Meta has increased its performance expectations and they may not have met the new standard, despite having received positive reviews in the past.

Maintaining such lists is not considered illegal unless it over-indexes on a protected class, like people of color. So long as that is not the case, Meta has free reign to add people to such lists. It is unfortunate and seems unfair to those added on the lists since they have no recourse and the company is not willing to offer any explanation about their specific circumstance.

If anyone from Meta has a better explanation for this phenomena, feel free to get in touch. We would love to know more.