Facebook, which was once considered to be among the best employers in the tech industry globally, is now not the company of choice for the talented candidates with alternative employment. Analysts say that this is a direct fall out of the scandal related to the data breach and privacy related scandal linked to Cambridge Analytica which is still hurting the largest social media company.

According to reports, there has been a significant drop in the rate of acceptance to job offers from Facebook since the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light in March last year where in it was revealed that personal data of up to 87 million of users of the social network had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica and was used to target ads in favor of the then US presidential candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

According to media reports, potential new recruits among top US schools, such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ivy League universities are showing a much lower level of interest in the jobs being offered by Facebook

According to reports citing former Facebook recruiters, the very huge loss of interest in joining Facebook positions and accepting its job offers is evident from the fact that the acceptance rates for full-time positions offered by the social media company to new graduates has dropped drastically to between 35 per cent and 55 per cent as of December compared to an average rate of acceptance of 85 per cent for the 2017-2018 school year. Perhaps Carnegie Mellon University accounted for the highest rate of decline in acceptance with the rate for new recruits falling down to 35 per cent.

The rate of acceptance of job offers for the software engineer candidates for Facebook’s product teams has also reportedly seen a decline. According to the report, compared to the high of nearly 90 per cent in late 2016, the rate of acceptance among those teams has fallen to almost 50% at the start of this year.

The total number of employees in Facebook increased by 36 per cent year-on-year for the 12 months to the end of the first quarter of 2019, said a Facebook spokesman.

After Facebook accepted that it had lost up to 3 million users in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in July last year, the company’s market value was eroded by $119 billion in a single day which was the largest one day wipe off for any publicly listed company ever.

The chair and chief executive of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, was criticized recently by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, in a recent column in the New York Times. And following issues with data, privacy and election interference, he also called for Facebook to be broken up.

The notion was rejected by the former UK deputy prime minister and Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, who said that “chopping a great American success story into bits is not something that’s going to make those problems go away”.

(Adapted from TheGuardian.com)