We couldn’t resist the joke in the title. The very social network that should help you find a job, LinkedIn, fires (or rather, announces that it will fire) almost 700 employees.
But of course the joke is a paradox: one thing is the service offered by social media, i.e. the possibility of connecting companies looking for staff and professionals who make their skills available. Another matter is the organizational chart of the LinkedIn company.
So the company, owned by Microsoft, announced a forthcoming redundancy plan in recent hours. Let’s find out better what it is, and how many employees will be left without work.
LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 employees
LinkedIn is firing people for the second time in a few months.
The announcement was made official on Monday 16 October, and the area most affected will be engineering. After Reuters had already feared the possibility of cuts in recent weeks, the American broadcaster CNBC was the first to come into possession of the note (now published, as we will see) confirming the layoff plan.
The (anonymous) source had made it known that the other sectors penalized by the cuts will be financial and human resources.
The cuts
To be precise, LinkedIn will lay off 668 workers, about 3% of its 20,000 total employees.
The people at the Microsoft-owned company who will be left without jobs join the tens of thousands of other jobs lost this year in the tech sector.
According to data from the employment company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 141,516 employees have already been cut globally in the first half of the year, compared to around 6,000 in 2022.
The note
The note was then published on Monday 16 October.
We report the translated text in full: “Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of running our business. The changes we shared with our team today will result in a reduction of approximately 668 roles across our engineering, product, talent and finance teams.
As we adapt our organizational structures and streamline our decision making, we continue to invest in strategic priorities for our future and ensure we continue to deliver value to our members and customers.
We are committed to providing our full support to all affected employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect.”
Executives Mohak Shroff and Tomer Cohen then announced that “563 roles in Research and Development will be cut. Specifically, 137 engineering management roles and 38 product roles are being reduced. Additionally, there will be 388 role reductions across our Engineering team, in an effort to better align resources with our FY24 plan [anno fiscale 2024, n.d.r.]and we will open a small number of new roles to fill some gaps in our ambitious roadmap.”
Why LinkedIn is firing people
Launched in 2003, LinkedIn was purchased in 2016 by Microsoft for $26.2 billion.
It boasts 950 million members, constantly growing. But Revenues have been slowing for eight consecutive quarters, and in the second quarter of the year growth was just 5%.
Recall that the company that owns LinkedIn, Microsoft, announced the cuts of 10,000 employees in January.
Yet, LinkedIn is ramping up its hiring in India. Behind the cut of almost 700 employees, however, there are those who are thinking about investments in artificial intelligence solutions, which allow savings on the workforce.
Layoffs in China in May
In an article from last May 9th we reported the news of LinkedIn’s layoffs in China (where the platform is called InCareer).
In truth, the Chinese branch closed its doors: the announcement was made in May and the action took place in August. Thus, 716 employees were left at home.
InCareer, founded in 2014, was one of the few Western social networks available in China, although managed by a Chinese company and under the control of the Beijing government.
The closure occurred, the company explained, due to “strong competition and the difficult macroeconomic environment” in China.