Government in dark on possible Irish impact from LinkedIn cuts

The Government has not received any notification from LinkedIn about possible collective job cuts in the Republic, a day after the so-called professionals’ social network said it would trim its global headcount by 3 per cent.

The Microsoft-owned company, which employs about 2,000 staff at its European headquarters in Dublin, announced on Monday that it will cut almost 700 roles from its roughly 20,000-strong workforce amid a slowdown in hiring, which has reduced demand for its services, and weaker advertising revenue growth than last year.

A spokesman for the company in Ireland said he had no knowledge of the likely impact of the announcement on LinkedIn’s headcount here.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Department of Enterprise said it has not received a collective redundancy notification from the tech company since May, when LinkedIn announced its first of two rounds of global job cuts in 2023 so far. The social network said at the time it planned to shut its Chinese jobs app and cut about 716 roles but it is not clear how many roles in Ireland were affected.

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For an organisation of its size, LinkedIn is required under Irish law to notify Minister for Enterprise Simon Coveney if it plans to make 30 or more workers redundant and must enter into an information and consultation period with employees. After notice has been given, the company must then wait 30 days before it can issue a notice of redundancy to any affected workers.

On Monday, LinkedIn said in a statement that the job cuts would be focused within its product, talent and finance teams globally. “Talent changes are a difficult but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the company said.

In May, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s CEO, said the company was seeing “shifts in customer behaviour and slower revenue growth”.

Tech giants including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have trimmed back their workforces this year after hiring rapidly during the pandemic. In January, Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs, less than 5 per cent of its workforce, to reduce costs and refocus on priorities such as artificial intelligence. More than 200,000 tech employees have been laid off in 2023, according to the lay-off tracker Layoffs.

In July, LinkedIn said its revenue for the three months that ended in June had grown 5 per cent from a year earlier, down from 10 per cent in 2022, with annual revenue surpassing $15 billion (€14.16 billion) for the first time. The rise was driven by its recruiting business, according to Microsoft’s disclosures. LinkedIn has 950 million users, a number that has increased for eight consecutive quarters. – Additional reporting: The New York Times