Mayer's ‘rigorous’ hiring practices causing company to miss out on top talent, says Yahoo employee

Marissa Mayer has been challenged on her hiring practices in internal meetings, with Yahoo employees accusing her of missing out on top engineering talent, an unnamed employee has alleged.

Speaking to Reuters, the employee said that Mayer bases much of her hiring process - which apparently always involves meeting a new employee personally - on whether they have degrees from "prestigious universities".

According to the employee, Mayer dismissed such accusations and instead accused her staff of being sub-par at recruitment.

Mayer apparently asked her staff, "Why can't we just be good at hiring?", which the employee told Reuters was "playing off a line" from 1989 romantic comedy Say Anything, starring John Cusack. This, said the source, is one of Mayer's favourite movies.

Yahoo currently has nearly 900 job openings which, in a company of 11,500 people, is a fair amount of vacancies. Mayer told investors in January 2013 that the company was seeing an increase in volume and quality of applicants for positions, however.

Though stock prices have risen by around 47 per cent since Mayer took over Yahoo in July 2012, her efforts to turn the ailing web company around have met with resistance more than once.

Most recently, Mayer was criticised last month for bringing in a ban on working from home in order to increase productivity and creativity at Yahoo. However, in late February it emerged the CEO has built a private nursery adjoining her office in order to provision her own child care in the office.