Other Technology | May 17, 2023
We are approaching the halfway point of this year and the wave of massive layoffs among tech companies that began in 2022 doesn’t seem to have ended. Almost every week, we hear news of well-known companies announcing staff cuts. In April, according to Crunchbase data, over 17,000 jobs were lost, and in May alone, over 3,000 people have been let go.
LinkedIn is not exempt from this trend. The world’s largest job networking site, which just turned 20, will be laying off 716 employees. The CEO of the Microsoft-owned company, Ryan Roslansky, said in a blog post this week that these moves are in response to “changes in customer behavior and slower revenue growth.”
Roslansky also added that the company is driving changes amid a “rapidly changing” global landscape and a “challenging macroeconomic environment.” As part of its commercial global reorganization plan, in addition to the layoffs, the company is also closing down the Chinese application InCareer.
The relationship between the US-based platform and the Asian country has been marked by tension from the start. LinkedIn first entered China with that name in 2014, but with a local version to comply with the country’s requirements to operate in that market. The strategy paid off. By 2021, according to Business of Apps data, LinkedIn had 50 million users in China.
In terms of magnitude, the Chinese market was the third most important for LinkedIn, after the United States and India. However, in 2021, the company announced that it would suspend registrations to focus on compliance with regulations, and later decided to abandon the LinkedIn brand and its entire social platform, replacing it with InCareer, a platform where only job postings could be published.
The social network had described its presence in China as a “challenging operating environment,” possibly due to strict controls on what can be published on the network and threats related to freedom of expression. In fact, LinkedIn was the last of the big US social networks still present in the country, as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example, had left China some time ago.
With this latest move, InCareer will cease to operate on August 9 of this year and LinkedIn’s presence will be substantially diluted, but not completely. Roslansky has said they will focus their strategy in China to help companies operating there with hiring, marketing, and training abroad, so they will continue to have employees on site in the human resources and marketing areas.
