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LinkedIn Cuts 960 Jobs as Pandemic Puts the Brakes on Corporate Hiring (reuters.com) 34

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Microsoft's professional networking site LinkedIn said on Tuesday it would cut about 960 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce, as the coronavirus pandemic is having a sustained impact on demand for its recruitment products. From a report: California-based LinkedIn helps employers assess a candidate's suitability for a role and employees use the platform to find new job. Jobs will be cut across sales and hiring divisions of the group globally. Announcing the plan in a message posted on LinkedIn's website, Chief Executive Ryan Roslansky said the company would provide at least 10 weeks of severance pay as well as health insurance for a year for U.S. employees, and will hire for newly-created roles from laid-off staff. "I want you to know these are the only layoffs we are planning," Roslansky said in his message. Affected staff, who have not yet been told, would be able to keep company-issued cell phones, laptops, and recently purchased equipment to help them work from home while making career transitions, he said.
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LinkedIn Cuts 960 Jobs as Pandemic Puts the Brakes on Corporate Hiring More

LinkedIn Cuts 960 Jobs as Pandemic Puts the Brakes on Corporate Hiring

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  • I sure hope (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    they get free LinkedIn premium subscription during "career transition" as well :)

  • We're hiring (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @10:46AM (#60314879)
    My company is hiring. BAE down the street is hiring. L3 is hiring. A quick glace at Google shows lots of open jobs. Amazon ditto (real jobs, not warehouse jobs). Perhaps the problem for LinkedIn is that the companies who are hiring don't use LinkedIn to do it, or perhaps they've come to realize that LinkedIn profiles are little better than Facebook profiles with regards to employee capabilities and fit.

    • Perhaps the problem for LinkedIn is that the companies who are hiring don't use LinkedIn to do it, or perhaps they've come to realize that LinkedIn profiles are little better than Facebook profiles with regards to employee capabilities and fit.

      My understanding about LinkedIn is that it is no longer popular. It is now often used by people wanting to keep in touch with former employees.

      • Perhaps the problem for LinkedIn is that the companies who are hiring don't use LinkedIn to do it, or perhaps they've come to realize that LinkedIn profiles are little better than Facebook profiles with regards to employee capabilities and fit.

        My understanding about LinkedIn is that it is no longer popular. It is now often used by people wanting to keep in touch with former employees.

        I'm not disagreeing with y'all, but I am going to take a different angle on the story because of the collision with this other story https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com] that I was just thinking of submitting to Slashdot's tender consideration. (However, I was amused to see the FP flop again. Why has Slashdot 2020 started treating some trolls' FPs with the disdain they deserve?)

        I was struck by three things as I read the Visual Capitalist story. (1) All of the "top" innovative companies are gigantic, but (2) In

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nazsco ( 695026 )

          "innovation" on those investment lists have a different meaning, which is: "innovation: v. To spend capital in a way that moves revenue from one cost center to another, newly created, cost center"

        • Read the visualcapitalist article, which I had not seen, and I appreciate the insight. I also had not thought about the sick irony of a company that helps people find jobs being unable to help its own people find jobs. Oh, and I'm totally not a Shanen sock puppet!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            How about if I offer to hire you as a sock puppet? Not sure what the joke's about, but it's kind of hard to imagine who is paying much attention to Slashdot 2020. I just like the feel of the editor, which (sometimes) helps me clarify my muddled thinking.

            Actually, my main beef these days with LinkedIn is different. It's the fake recruiters pushing 419 scams. I'd actually be glad to work for one particular company (Rakuten Mobile) and I'd even be glad to consider a sufficiently interesting job offering from a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        Yes, that, Microsoft doesn't time its acquisitions well and runs them into the ground, see Nokia. LinkedIn has become stale and musty, still used by self-styled serious corporate types with blinders on. Also, a company acquired by Microsoft becomes automatically uncool.

    • *some* company are doing essential hiring only, with triplicate justification signed by the office with the tiger in the basement. But most company have utterly stopped hiring. The one I am in certainly, and is thinking of a plan to reduce force. I am betting my shirt off if you look at total number of job offer in the country you are, compared to today, it will be vastly less.

    • My company is hiring. BAE down the street is hiring. L3 is hiring. A quick glace at Google shows lots of open jobs. Amazon ditto (real jobs, not warehouse jobs). Perhaps the problem for LinkedIn is that the companies who are hiring don't use LinkedIn to do it, or perhaps they've come to realize that LinkedIn profiles are little better than Facebook profiles with regards to employee capabilities and fit.

      So, there are local areas hiring white collar jobs. In my area, there are a few places hiring fro white collar jobs but the net is lots of white collar job losses.

      Now just about every supermarket, fast food chain, Target, Lowes, Home Depot are all hiring in my area.

      But if you get laid off from your white collar (especially if it is STEM) having a year or so of working some shit job to pay the bills is a career killer. It happened to me.

      "Sorry, you don't have the skills."

      "We are looking for someone with m

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        I once bitched to a buddy who was an HR manager about it. He said it's not us; it's the hiring managers. Here is what he said on that discussion: "When I was told that people forget skills, I responded, "People do not forget a decades worth of experience in only a year." I was ignored."

        I don't think that is the real reason they don't hire people with gaps. My opinion is the reason is closer to why companies want to hire from top universities. They want to take advantage of the screening processes already done by others to reduce the work necessary to identify good hires. If Stanford accepted them, they must be smart. If no one has hired them for a STEM job in a year, a lot of other hiring managers must have decided they aren't good enough, so I don't need to waste my time moving forward w

      • I've never been laid off, but I have gotten my ass out the door without my next job in my pocket days before a company folded, and the sad reality of today's working world is you might have to move to find work. I've been in Houston - not many options there - and San Diego - ditto. I ended up in New England more or less at random, and have found between NH, MA, CT, RI, and VT (not much in ME) that I can piss of companies nearly forever and still land another job. Though I did have a friend who lost his j

    • " LinkedIn profiles are little better than Facebook profiles with regards to employee capabilities and fit."

      They have more fakes than FB for sure.

    • What? This is like saying resumes are useless. People shouldn't be hired on the basis of a resume alone, but it's a good jumping off point, and has been for...how many years? How is LinkedIn any better/worse than say, Dice.com, or Monster.com?

    • Yeah, my company is hiring for several positions at the moment as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by glitch! ( 57276 )

      My company is hiring. BAE down the street is hiring. L3 is hiring. A quick glace at Google shows lots of open jobs.

      Linkedin is failing me. I have years of well paid remote development. If you have any leads, I would be glad to receive them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      It's not whether people are hiring. It's that the job market is operating at substantially lower volumes than a year ago.

      Many companies had a multi-month recruitment freeze and many are hiring only essential positions.

      Even the jobs being advertised aren't necessarily being filled. Several companies have advertised for a role, waited three months, then written to ask me if I'm still interested. They're not failing to find candidates, they're pausing their recruitment.

      On the plus side, one of the ones that I

  • acquisition (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @10:46AM (#60314883) Homepage
    I almost wonder if they are using COVID-19 to mask layoffs that usually occur after an acquisition.
    • Most large companies are using covid as an excuse to cull.
      • Most large companies are using covid as an excuse to cull.

        Most large companies are using covid as an excuse to leech off the taxpayers even more than they usually do so they can continue to waste money on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, even while declaring bankruptcy [nytimes.com].

      • They may be using it as an excuse, but it's mostly a legit one. Other than a few specific industries, nearly every company is feeling pain from Covid.

        That said, whoever makes all that plexiglass they are installing at every checkout in the world much be doing amazing.

  • ^ Subject. I've certainly noticed an increase. I had an account before M$ bought them, I rarely check/modify it, but the emails come pretty much every day now.

  • LinkedIn has 16,000 employees? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @10:58AM (#60314929) Homepage

    I remember when Twitter had staff cuts, and I was shocked to read that they have nearly 5000 employees. I mean, WTF? It's a web service. It's got to have some good hardware, run by seriously good admins. It's got to have a team of web developers. And it needs some marketing dweebs to sell ads. Dunno how that gets you to 5000 people - I'd say there's a lot of fat to cut.

    So here we are with LinkedIn. Another web service. More complex - they need a few more developers. Same need for marketing types. And 960 people is...6% of their workforce? So they have 16,000 employees - more than three times as many as Twitter? Seriously, what do they all do?

    • I would guess a very large sales force, account managers out the wazoo and 5-6 layers of management. The number of techs working the infrastructure and code changes are probably very small.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SirAstral ( 1349985 )

        bingo!

        But that is just how the Pareto Principle works... practically everywhere you look, you can see distributions all along the good old 80/20 split.

        Even in life is people look around, you will see 80% of effort going to managing perception... just imagine what things would look like if 80% were doing the work? 4 times the productivity! Meanwhile Management spends 80% of its time trying to get the 20% to do the work of 80%.

    • It's the 1000 monkies at a typewriter theory

    • And it needs some marketing dweebs to sell ads.

      You say this as if it is a minor thing. These people are the majority of Twitter's employees.

      The same is true at LinkedIn. The majority of employees sell ads or support those that do.

    • "I remember when Twitter had staff cuts, and I was shocked to read that they have nearly 5000 employees. I mean, WTF? It's a web service."

      Yes, the IT department has only 1 employee, the other 4999 work the complaint phones.

    • Linked in purchased other companies including those that make up linkedin-learning. They picked up headcount with every acquisition

    • So they have 16,000 employees - more than three times as many as Twitter? Seriously, what do they all do?

      I expect very few of those people are employed doing the things you and I see when we look at LinkedIn.

      Given how the company has misbehaved in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of those 16000 employees are involved with data mining and sales of your personal information.

  • What with all the on-site, in-person work you need to operate a site like LinkedIn.

    I imagine it must have put a hold on all the door-to-door cold-calls they constantly do.

    Wait, what? All of LinkedIn's work can be done remotely? No sh--?

    Then I can't imagine why they're laying off workers. And I'm sure they're not filing for any sort of assistance at the same time...

    /sarcasm

  • Useless site for members. Great site for intelligence agencies and spam marketers. Shut it down!

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