As ongoing uncertainty in the broader ad market, LinkedIn has announced that it’s culling another 668 roles, as it looks to rationalize expenditure.
As per LinkedIn:
“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. 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 redundancies will primarily be within LinkedIn’s engineering team, with over 500 engineering staff given notice. At the same time, LinkedIn is also reportedly increasing hiring activity in India, in line with market demand and opportunity. India is now LinkedIn’s second-largest user market, and rising fast.
While LinkedIn, overall, has seen continued usage and engagement growth, its ad revenue growth has been slowing for the past two years, in line with broader market trends.
In its most recent earnings update, now included within parent company Microsoft’s earnings report, LinkedIn also noted that its Talent Solutions business has been impacted by a slowdown in hiring this year.
LinkedIn also cut 716 jobs in May, as part of Microsoft’s expanded cuts, and this latest announcement is largely in line with the ongoing rationalization of the company. LinkedIn also announced that it would be leaving the Chinese market in May, which may have impacted its requirements.
As noted above. LinkedIn says that the reductions will have no impact on its strategic priorities, as it continues to expand its services.
In some ways, it’s obviously a bad sign, in that LinkedIn is not seeing the ad growth that it would like, but it is also a period of significant change for the industry more broadly, which includes a re-focus for the app’s development.
Though you would also hope that LinkedIn would see more product development. The app’s been notoriously slow to implement change, with the LinkedIn platform being largely the same for over a decade. A bigger focus on video seems overdue, while events are still not overly easy to find within the app.
It would seem, then, that engineering still has a lot to do in this respect, and it’ll be interesting to see how these reductions impact overall innovation at the app.
