October 17, 2023
The Ish Hit The Fan After LinkedIn Employees Learned Of Pending Layoffs From Online “Kill List’
On Oct. 16, more than 600 LinkedIn employees were laid off after an internal “kill list” mysteriously hit the fan.
“Talent changes are a difficult but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” LinkedIn wrote in a press release. LinkedIn announced in a company-wide email that approximately 668 roles across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams were eliminated, equal to roughly 3% of the company’s global workforce.
After some LinkedIn workers found their names on a circulating list, one posted what they described as a “kill list” on the job-posting site Blind, Business Insider reported.
An employee noticed that LinkedIn’s human resources team was responsible for creating the update on LinkedIn’s GroupID tool, a third-party system that was used “to create and manage distribution lists.”
Dozens of workers noticed their potential unemployment and voiced their concerns to management. In response, the GroupID list was immediately deleted despite the lingering history. The tool strangely lost service, and then the emails confirming the layoffs poured in.
The posting occurred Sunday; the layoffs occurred Monday.
LinkedIn said it is “adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision making.” It is “committed to providing our full support to all impacted employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect.”
The news comes after the company disclosed in May it was laying off 716 employees. In its most recent quarterly report released in July, LinkedIn said its revenue increased 5% year-over-year and surpassed $15 billion for the first time. Increasing website membership for the past eight quarters moved the needle to more than 950 million accounts. Additionally, the company’s talent solutions business surpassed $7 billion in revenue for the first time, and the hiring business “took share for the fourth consecutive quarter.”
Despite revenue and user acceleration, LinkedIn said in its May layoff announcement that it is witnessing “shifts in customer behavior and slower revenue growth.”