LinkedIn just trimmed its headcount by another 700

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) is up 2.0% at writing after LinkedIn – the social network for businesses it bought in 2016 laid off nearly 700 of its employees on Monday.

Why did LinkedIn decide to cut jobs?

Jobs that were cut the most were in engineering followed by human resources and finance, as per the memo that you can read in full here.

The announcement follows eight consecutive quarters of revenue slowdown. LinkedIn expects the job cut to help with “agility, accountability, efficiency and transparency”. Its revenue was up only 5.0% in the latest reported quarter.

Interestingly, though, LinkedIn does plan on accelerating hiring in India at the same time as part of its “strategic priorities for the future”, an anonymous source told CNBC today.  

Shares of Microsoft Corp are currently down about 7.0% versus their year-to-date high.

Tech sector has cut roughly 150K jobs this year

Note that LinkedIn is not the only subsidiary of Microsoft that’s moved to cut jobs.

The multinational at large had announced plans of lowering its headcount by 10,000 at the start of this year – and even more on top of it in July to cut costs in the midst of its overall revenue losing steam a little bit.

LinkedIn itself laid off just over 700 of its employees in May as well. More broadly, the tech sector slashed more than 141,000 jobs in the first half of this year versus only 6,000 in 2022.

Microsoft is expected to report its Q1 earnings next week. Consensus is for it to earn $2.65 a share this quarter versus $2.35 per share a year ago.