LinkedIn cuts 668 Jobs in second layoff round this year

San Francisco: LinkedIn, the professional social networking platform owned by Microsoft, said Monday that it would cut about 668 jobs, or roughly 3 per cent of its workforce.

The cuts, the company’s second round of layoffs this year, affect LinkedIn’s engineering, product, talent and finance teams. In May, LinkedIn laid off 716 employees worldwide and said it was reducing its business in China, citing declining demand in an uncertain job market.

LinkedIn, which has 19,500 employees across 36 offices globally, did not detail the reasons for the job cuts Monday. In a statement, the company said it was “streamlining our decision making” and that it would continue “to invest in strategic priorities.”

A LinkedIn spokesperson declined to comment beyond the statement. In May, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s CEO, said the company was seeing “shifts in customer behavior and slower revenue growth.”

Tech giants including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have trimmed back their workforces this year after hiring rapidly during the pandemic. In January, Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs, less than 5 per cent of its workforce, to reduce costs and refocus on priorities such as artificial intelligence. More than 200,000 tech employees have been laid off in 2023, according to the layoff tracker Layoffs.

In July, LinkedIn said its revenue for the three months that ended in June had grown 5 per cent from a year earlier, with annual revenue surpassing $15 billion for the first time. The rise was driven by its recruiting business, according to Microsoft’s disclosures. LinkedIn has 950 million users, a number that has increased for eight consecutive quarters.

LinkedIn, like many tech companies, has been investing in artificial intelligence. This month, it announced a suite of AI-powered products to help with marketing, recruiting and sales.