When Mark Zuckerberg shared his basic hiring rule at Meta to tell college students: The most important decision you make in college is ...

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs in first half of 2025, Meta CEO has been on an AI hiring blitz. A Twitter user who goes by the moniker @HinataMotivates, said to be a tech-motivation account, shared a podcast clip (going back to 2022) where Zuckerberg talks about Meta hiring rule and his advice for college students. Mark Zuckerberg has a hiring rule that he says is cardinal for him while hiring anyone and the one that he says is also an important tip for any college student. In an episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” hosted by MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg said that most people know Facebook’s dorm-room origin story and that many have learned the wrong lesson from it. He said that his initial ability to launch Facebook wasn’t because he dropped out of college. According to Zuckerberg, it was due to the personal connections he made while he was still in school.

Who you spend time with in college, Zuckerberg said, is “the most important decision” any student can make in college. He advised college students that choosing their social circle is the most pivotal decision, as people tend to emulate those around them. “You become the people you surround yourself with,” he said in the podcast. “I think probably people are too, in general, objective focused, and maybe not focused enough on the connections and the people who they’re basically building relationships [with].” Meta CEO Zuckerberg is said to have met his Facebook co-founders ⁠— Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum ⁠— while the five were students at Harvard University.





While the group split up in a not-so-happy manner, Zuckerberg said on the podcast that he tries to prioritize relationships over objectives. This applies especially to hiring. Zuckerberg said that he extends the idea to his Meta hiring philosophy: He only employs candidates he did hypothetically work for, underscoring reciprocity and alignment in professional networks. When evaluating a job candidate, he imagines what it would be like to work for that person. “I will only hire someone to work for me if I can see myself working for them,” he said.

Mark Zuckerberg said that the strategy creates a work environment that’s both more cohesive and more productive: If you work with people who share your values on a human level, you’ll be more likely to smoothly achieve your work goals together. It’s all about finding personal compatibility, he said, not unlike “choosing friends or a partner.”