Facebook isn't having a good month. After 87 million Facebook ($FB) users were informed that their personal data was shared - and used - by Cambridge Analytica for nefarious political purposes, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sitting down to testify in front of a House Committe where he still sits today as we write this article.
As Facebook attempts to weather the storm and assure users (and business partners) that it's really just a fun social network that means no harm, it seems the company is cooling off its hiring efforts in the meantime.
The above charts shows open positions at Facebook since we began tracking them in 2016. As you can see, Facebook slowed its hiring pace this month. To be fair, there was a similar lull at this time last year, but this lull comes after Facebook's most aggressive hiring year to date, in which it added 1,000 new positions in just the past 12 months. The comparable period in 2017 only saw about 600 new positions added to its job-listings site.
As we discussed a couple weeks ago, despite the lull, job openings containing the word "Trust" are up:
Also up in the middle of the March hiring slowdown were positions with the word "Privacy" in their titles:
All of this could be cyclical hiring practices at the company, but the timing is interesting nonetheless.
In our March 22 look at Facebook hriig, the company is also looking for people to handle issues related to security, trust, policy, and privacy. See that full study here.