LinkedIn Sacks Employees In Recruitment Department: Report

This comes days after the LinkedIn owner Microsoft announced layoffs in its hardware divisions including HoloLens, Surface, and Xbox teams

In 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.

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Employment and job-focused social media platform LinkedIn has laid off employees from its recruitment department, according to a report by the news website, The Information. This comes days after the LinkedIn owner Microsoft announced layoffs in its hardware divisions including HoloLens, Surface, and Xbox teams. The tech firm sacked 617 of its employees, Bloomberg reported.

The Information report did not specify the number of employees impacted by the layoffs.

In 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. This latest announcement adds LinkedIn to a list of tech firms that fired workers to cut costs. Microsoft-owned open-source developer platform GitHub is also laying off 10 per cent of its workforce through the end of the company's fiscal year.

In January 2023, Microsoft announced its decision to let go of 10,000 employees, or around 5 per cent of its total workforce. At the time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We will align our cost structure with our revenue and where we see customer demand. Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3. This represents less than 5 per cent of our total employee base.”

However, Nadella added, “We are committed to ensuring all those whose roles are eliminated have our full support during these transitions.” 

He said that US-benefit-eligible employees will receive severance pay, continuing healthcare coverage for six months, continued vesting of stock awards for six months, career transition services, and 60 days notice prior to termination, regardless of whether such notice is legally required.

In October 2022, Microsoft laid off about 1,000 people from a variety of its business units due to the worldwide economic slowdown. Recently, hundreds of workers at several tech firms like Google, Meta, and Amazon have been impacted by mass layoffs. Yahoo reportedly also aims to slash more than 20 per cent of its total workforce by end of this year in a major restructuring of its ad tech division.