More than 600 LinkedIn employees in California have been formally notified that they will lose their jobs this summer, as the Microsoft-owned professional networking giant pushes through a broad restructuring.
A new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) report reveals that 606 LinkedIn employees were notified of permanent layoffs last week, which will go into effect on July 13, New York Post reported.
The California cuts are geographically concentrated across the company's Bay Area footprint.
As per the report, the bulk of the layoffs, 352, come from LinkedIn's Mountain View headquarters, with another 66 remote employees tied to the same city. A further 108 employees were laid off at the San Francisco office, 59 at Sunnyvale, and 21 in Carpinteria.
The California figure, however, may only be part of the picture. Reuters reported that LinkedIn is preparing to cut about 5% of its global workforce, citing people familiar with the plans. Based on a publicly listed headcount of more than 17,500, that would amount to roughly 875 jobs.
The layoffs were foreshadowed by an internal memo from LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero which was reported by Business Insider earlier this month.
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“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,” the memo stated.
“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,” the CEO added.
He also added the company was planning on, “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.”
The cuts span LinkedIn's engineering, product, marketing, and corporate teams. The company is also reducing vendor costs and closing its office in Graz, Austria.
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The cuts come just weeks after LinkedIn reported 12% revenue growth year-over-year in its third-quarter earnings statement. Meanwhile, a source told Reuters that AI automation goals were not the stated cause of the cuts — a notable caveat given the prevailing narrative across Big Tech.
LinkedIn's parent company Microsoft also recently announced buyouts that could affect up to 7% of its 1,25,000-person workforce.
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