What you need to know
- LinkedIn is Microsoft’s highly popular business-oriented social network.
- With staff running in the tens of thousands, LinkedIn is joining Microsoft’s year of layoffs, with 700 positions impacted across the globe.
- As part of the cost-cutting effort, LinkedIn is winding down operations in China, owing to “fierce” local competition.
LinkedIn is everybody’s favorite work-oriented social network, where we go to brag about our achievements in this weird, pacified, and ingenuine way we think employers might find to be professional and potentially desirable. Sadly, it seems some of LinkedIn’s own employees may also be heading to the service to job hunt in the near term.
As part of Microsoft’s cost-cutting measures for the year, its social network LinkedIn is shedding approximately 700 staff from its 20,000-strong team. In a note shared (opens in new tab) on LinkedIn itself, CEO Ryan Roslansky outlined the firm’s “need” to cut costs and streamline, echoing phrasing used by many other tech companies in recent months, describing a challenging “macroeconomic environment.” A big part of the restructuring effort is to wind down operations in China, owing to “fierce” competition from local rivals. LinkedIn will instead focus on helping firms hiring in China from outside of China, according to the note, while closing its local teams for marketing, operations, and development.
Roslansky noted the rapidly changing technological landscape and hoped that LinkedIn could become more “agile” by reducing managerial layers. He also emphasized the role AI might play at the firm in the coming months, as Microsoft in general works to integrate its exclusive OpenAI licenses for tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E image generation into all of its products.
Roslansky emphasized that LinkedIn has seen “record” monthly active users, while conceding that revenue growth had stalled, while blaming “changing user behavior” for the lost cash. LinkedIn monetizes in a variety of ways, from business-to-business services, as well as its LinkedIn Premium subscription that helps recruiters and potential recruitees find work connections more rapidly.
