LinkedIn, the business social networking platform owned by Microsoft, announced Monday it is laying off 668 employees, amounting to more than 3% of its staff, as part of its alleged organizational restructuring efforts. The decision marks the second round of mass layoffs at LinkedIn this year and will impact employee roles in engineering, product, talent and finance teams.
“Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the company said in a statement. “While we are adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision-making, we are continuing to invest in strategic priorities for our future and to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers.”
The layoffs affect the nearly 20,000 employees across LinkedIn’s 36 offices based both in the U.S. and abroad. This comes as the company announced it surpassed $15 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023. LinkedIn reportedly saw a 5% year-over-year growth, with 7% growth in constant currency, the company says in its statistics page.
“As we continue to execute on our FY24 plan, we need to also evolve how we work and what we prioritize so we can deliver on the key initiatives we’ve identified that will have an outsized impact in achieving our business goals,” LinkedIn executives Mohak Shroff and Tomer Cohen wrote in the memo to staff regarding October’s layoffs, Business Insider reported.
“This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership, and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering,” the memo added.
Microsoft officially purchased a 49% stake in OpenAI for $13 billion in April and released a series of AI features on LinkedIn this year including an AI-powered coaching feature for premium subscribers and an AI-assisted candidate discovery feature for recruiters.
When asked if LinkedIn laid off nearly 700 employees to make way for AI, a LinkedIn spokesperson did not directly respond but told Gizmodo, “This restructuring is to support LinkedIn’s future broadly.”
LinkedIn laid off 716 employees in May of this year at its China-based jobs app, InCareer, citing a need to “manage expenses.” The layoffs affected about 3.5% of the company’s workforce and were conducted despite an 8% growth in revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2023.
