When Lori Goler joined Facebook eight years ago to lead its recruiting efforts, the social networking giant wasn’t quite a giant yet.
Back then, Facebook (FB) had around 500 workers and was small enough that the company didn’t have regular employee performance reviews. But as Goler got to personally know more employees she discovered that many workers didn’t know how they were performing, leaving them feeling rudderless.
Recounting her first days as Facebook’s top recruiter, Goler explained Tuesday at Coins2Day’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summi t in Laguna Niguel, Calif. How she learned the importance of performance reviews.
“I feel everyday like I could get fired,” Goler recalled some workers saying before the reviews. “I never get any feedback.”
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Now, Facebook has regular employee reviews, but the goal is not to focus on “poor performers,” she explained. Instead, it’s to get to know what skills and tastes workers have and how to ensure that they are doing the type of work they want to do.
And while many traditional businesses struggle to accommodate the needs of so-called millennials, whose more cavalier ways of working can seem counter-intuitive or downright annoying to management, Facebook is trying to learn how to handle the needs of the next wave of young workers.
This next generation, with many future workers still in school, are used to living in worlds where they have their own personal devices and “personalized feeds” that give them the content they want from apps like Instagram and Facebook, she said. These people will enter the workforce and expect work to cater to their needs, Goler explained.
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Goler said Facebook is trying to accommodate millennials and its younger predecessor by talking to each worker and figuring out how their individual skills can be used to make a more personalized career path, not something more traditional and cookie cutter-like.