Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is reportedly laying off hundreds of employees across multiple teams. The professional networking site is reportedly cutting 5% of its global workforce, or approximately 875 employees. In a statement to Business Insider, a LinkedIn spokesperson said that the job cuts come, “As part of our regular business planning, we’ve implemented organizational changes to best position ourselves for future success.”In an internal memo sent to LinkedIn employees, CEO Daniel Shapero confirmed that the company’s Global Business Organization, marketing, engineering, and product teams will be affected by the latest round of job cuts. The report claims that affected employees were told they would receive calendar invites shortly after the memo was sent.It’s important to note that LinkedIn employs around 17,500 people globally. The company is also reducing spending on marketing campaigns, vendor costs, customer events, and underutilised office space while shutting down its Graz, Austria office, the report adds.LinkedIn parent Microsoft has also been reducing costs while preparing for major spending on AI infrastructure, with planned capital expenditures of around $190 billion this year. The company also recently offered buyouts to long-serving employees, with severance packages of up to 39 weeks of base pay, the report added.
What LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero wrote in its memo to employees
In the memo (seen by BI), Shapero wrote: “Team,Economic opportunity is one of the societal issues of our time, and Linkedin has been and will continue to be the platform that professionals and companies turn to as they navigate the changing world of work. For us to meet this moment, we must ready ourselves to deliver a step change in impact across our products, businesses, and platforms, while continuing to operate more profitably. We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs.Today I’m sharing the difficult decision that I, along with our leadership team, have made to reduce roles across GBO, Marketing, Engineering and Product. If you are impacted, or proposed to be impacted in EMEA & APAC, by these changes, you will receive a calendar invite to a notification meeting within the next hour. For impacted teams, you’ll learn more about your org-specific information from your leaders shortly, and updates will be added to go/CompanyExchange throughout today.In addition to role reductions, we are scaling back investments in some areas including marketing campaigns, vendor spend, customer events, and underutilized office space, so we can focus teams on priorities that have the broadest impact with the highest ROl. You will receive details about these changes from respective functional leaders.I want to acknowledge and thank those who will be leaving Linkedin. You have helped build LinkedIn’s culture and platform into what it is today, and I hope you are proud of the lasting impact your work will continue to have on our members, customers, and colleagues.For those staying, first and foremost, I would like to invite you to support our impacted colleagues. We will move forward together with focus and clear priorities to reach our potential as the platform that the world’s professionals and companies increasingly turn to.Thank you, again, to our teammates who are departing, and to everyone across LinkedIn who continues to show up and support each other.Dan”