When asked what the average Facebook employee is like, Janelle Gale, Facebook's vice president of human resources laughs. "We don't have an average Facebook employee," she says.
"Our recruiting practices are really broad," says Gale. "We use a lot of different channels to find people because we're trying to find talent no matter where they come from or what they've been doing." And yet, there is one characteristic that all Facebook employees share.
"The type of people we attract are really focused on solving big problems," says Gale. "The thing that we look for the most is hiring people who are oriented to moving beyond the status quo and figuring out how to make things better."
CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg says his goal in 2018 is to fix Facebook's issues, including foreign interference and harassment on its platforms. He's also been addressing fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, revealed in March.
Part of the solution is hiring new impact-driven employees, says Liz Wamai, Facebook's director of recruiting.
"Mark's personal challenge for 2018 is to fix Facebook, so when you talk about separating recruiting and retention, I actually think it's quite part and parcel of recruiting people who want to work on the most important problems about connecting the world," she said during Glassdoor's Best Places to Work Tour in February.
Internally, Facebook calls these problem solvers "builders." Being a "builder" means constantly improving the company and improving yourself.
"We pay a lot of attention to hiring learners and really being oriented to hiring people who know they have something to learn and are really open to and seeking feedback and want to grow," says Gale.
The typical Facebook hire "thrives in an environment where they are problem-solving, where they are working on things, where they are building things, where they are challenging the way we have done things either in our process or our product," explains Gale. "They are looking to make Facebook better, and that's the trait that we are looking for."
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