Businesses and corporations on the whole have been immensely aided by LinkedIn. These areas include recruitment, branding, and marketing. Yet, as many business owners and professionals have seen in the last few weeks, LinkedIn has begun to cut jobs. How could the social networking standard of the business itself suddenly be in a position to have layoffs within its own organization? As with anything, it depends on who you ask.
LINKEDIN Layoffs | Recent News on Job Cuts
LinkedIn is an internationally renowned company. The company has held its own for the last 20 years in the realm of social networking. It hasn’t been the hub for life updates like Facebook. It has not been the hub for all your favorite still shots or reels like Instagram, either. LinkedIn has undoubtedly flourished by connecting people to people in the realm of business. The platform offers things like a personal profile to boost your resume. This feature has been a “must-have” for first-time professionals looking to land their ideal job for the last two decades. At the same time, it’s been a great way for well-seasoned professionals to stay connected with one another. In some instances, these seasoned professionals have even helped one another climb the ladder just a little higher within whatever respective industry they are in.
The naysayers and critics out there might say that the LinkedIn layoffs are due to the company “falling apart.” Others may say they’ve had “too many setbacks” financially. But what information does someone find when they dig a little deeper? Quite the opposite.
InCareer Shutdown
According to a recent Forbes post, the run of the short is this: LinkedIn shut down its Chinese application, InCareer because the market in China for an app such as this was seemingly oversaturated. As a result, 700 jobs were cut in that region. This tells us that LinkedIn isn’t falling apart. The company is just moving away from one small initiative and endeavor. The purpose is to keep after its primary goal and aim. LinkedIn dipped its toes in China by launching InCareer in 2021 with hopeful risk for one new area of international expansion but made a decision to shut down that app so that LinkedIn could keep throttling forward worldwide in other aspects. LinkedIn’s CEO, Ryan Roslansky, shared that although the LinkedIn layoffs decision was difficult, it was out of “conviction to adapt our strategy in order to make our vision a reality”.
In looking at the finer details and numbers, although 3.5% of LinkedIn’s overall workforce was cut, nearly 20,000 employees at LinkedIn remain and are going strong. At the same time, though pessimism breeds across the internet with an ongoing narrative that LinkedIn may be experiencing setbacks, LinkedIn’s earnings across the board were positive with 8% revenue growth year-on-year to 3.7 billion.
With the revenue already increasing on the whole for LinkedIn, Roslansky shared that they cut jobs to “manage expenses” (CNBC) as well as a way to help “reevaluate in a changing economic landscape” (Entrepreneur.com). Plainly put, it seems as though the company took jobs out of one sector in order to pour energy into another. And that’s where the global strategy shift comes into play.
LINKEDIN Layoffs| Global Strategy Shift
Whether we realize it or not, we’ve been in a globalized world for more than a century. Given this, it is more and more the norm for major companies to make significant changes all across the globe for all sorts of reasons. Even overnight. Whether we’re talking Apple, Amazon, IBM, or whoever, we’ve seen tech giants for the last number of decades make incredibly hard decisions with layoffs in order to shift focus or shift resource allocation to keep moving forward.
All the details on LinkedIn would show that their move to make some layoffs abroad is no exception. As shared in Entrepreneur, LinkedIn’s global strategy shift will “focus on efficiency, agility, and aligning teams for profitable growth.” With this perceptive move taking place, 250 new jobs will be created as Roslansky and his company looks “to serve emerging and growth markets more effectively”.
LinkedIn seemingly has looked at the international market, made some well-processed adjustments, and is moving forward.
