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 come in LinkedIn's engineering team, with over 500 engineering staff receiving notice. Concurrently, LinkedIn is reportedly boosting hiring activities in India, in step with the market's demand and opportunity. India has already become the second largest market for LinkedIn, and is rising rapidly.

While LinkedIn, overall, is seeing continued usage and engagement growth, its ad revenue growth has been slowing the past two years, mirroring broader market trends.
In its most recent earnings update, now included in parent company Microsoft's report, LinkedIn also said it has seen a slowdown this year in hiring, particularly in its Talent Solutions business.

LinkedIn also cut 716 positions in May, part of the more extensive layoffs made by Microsoft, and the current round of layoffs fits well with the company's overall rationalization process. In May, LinkedIn also decided to withdraw from the Chinese market, which could impact its requirements.

As already discussed above. According to LinkedIn, the cuts do not affect its strategic goals since it is still extending 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'd also hope LinkedIn saw more product development. The app has notoriously been slow to change, and it's been basically the same for LinkedIn even over a decade. I think video better makes its way into the focus, while events aren't totally easy to find within the app.

But in reality, of course, it would appear that engineering still has a lot to do in this respect and interesting how those reductions might end up affecting overall innovation at the app.