Keaisha M.
Sourcer for Meta’s AR/VR team
As a Black Woman in Tech and now that I have a daughter, it’s important to me to help make the world a place where she’s able to see opportunity in places it didn’t exist before. I hope that one day, she’ll look at me and say, “I can do that…because my mom did.
“Are you sure?”
That’s what friends and family said when I told them I decided to join the team at Meta.
I grew up in East Palo Alto, very near to Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. It wasn’t the best area then. I didn’t see many people from my neighborhood working in tech or at Meta. Many people who lived there thought of Meta as another big Silicon Valley company—expanding and bringing in more people and traffic—and some still do. But many of those people still don’t really know what we do, how we give back to our communities, or that they could have the opportunity to work here.
I applied for a role at Meta and interviewed here much earlier in my career. That interview process was an emotional rollercoaster! I went through multiple interview rounds with different people. I got great feedback throughout the process, but they decided to hire someone with more specialized experience for that particular role.
My loved ones knew how frustrating that was for me. They didn’t want to see me go through that again—and I didn’t want to, either! In 2017, I was living in Atlanta but I started considering moving back to California. I hadn’t even considered applying to Meta again, but my friend Bernita (who’s also from East Palo Alto) reached out with an opportunity. She had just started working on the Access program, which helps connect people from the communities where we both grew up to opportunities to work at Meta. Her enthusiasm for her work and the company’s community impact was infectious. She was so energized—and seeing how open and excited Meta is about including people who grew up here really spoke to me.
I decided to apply for the Sourcer Development Program she recommended. This program helps people with no recruiting experience to learn to be sourcers at Meta. My interview experience this time was much different than the first time around. I was accepted and eventually hired on full time!
As a sourcer, it’s my job now to find passive candidates for our roles. I do their initial screen and set them up with a hiring manager to interview with and a recruiter to continue the process. Interviewing anywhere can be intimidating. Being in recruiting gives me the chance to create a memorable experience for others who interview here at Meta. I pride myself on making sure people enjoy the process.
People used to see “East Palo Alto” or “Menlo Park” on a resume and assume something negative. It’s changed so much, but we still have work to do. And I love helping to build those opportunities and share them with people in my community. It’s so important that people like me, who live here or grew up here, feel like Meta is a part of their community—that we care about them and there are opportunities for them here.
Now that I am a mother, it’s important to me to help make the world a place where my children are able to see opportunity in places it didn’t exist before. Being able to work here makes me feel like they have a chance.
I hope that one day, they’ll look at me and say, “I can do that…because my mom did.”