LinkedIn cuts 5% of staff as it refocuses on growth areas

LinkedIn is cutting about 875 employees, roughly 5% of its global workforce, as it reorders teams and pushes resources toward the parts of the business still growing. Affected staff in engineering, product and marketing were notified on Wednesday, May 13, while the company said the changes were part of routine business planning aimed at positioning LinkedIn for future success.

For monday.com employees, the sharper message is not the size of the reduction but the logic behind it. LinkedIn still has more than 17,500 full-time workers worldwide, yet it is trimming headcount inside a mature software business to shift investment toward higher-priority work. That is the kind of signal people in SaaS cannot ignore: growth no longer guarantees headcount growth, and each role is being judged more tightly against output, efficiency and strategic value.

That has direct consequences inside companies like monday.com. Selective hiring tends to mean fewer internal moves, narrower job definitions and more pressure on managers to do more with flatter teams. It also changes how employees think about mobility. When one large software company is cutting in engineering, product and marketing rather than only in clearly underperforming areas, workers across the sector have to assume that role mix and productivity are being scrutinized more closely than before.

A source familiar with the matter said the layoffs were not driven by artificial intelligence replacing jobs, which makes the move even more telling. The message is not that AI is eliminating every role overnight. It is that leadership teams are still using AI, automation and reorganization to justify where they spend, where they hire and where they hold the line. For employees, that often shows up as more pressure to prove impact with fewer layers of management and fewer guarantees that a growing company will keep expanding payroll at the same pace.

monday.com has been making the opposite case to investors. The company said first-quarter 2026 revenue rose 24% year over year to $351.3 million, with record GAAP operating income of $19.8 million and record non-GAAP operating income of $49.0 million. It ended the quarter with 3,211 employees, 4,547 customers above $50,000 in annual recurring revenue and a 110% net dollar retention rate.

The company also said AI productivity gains were helping it grow revenue without adding headcount in lockstep, and that it launched an AI Work Platform with native agents. For monday.com’s engineers, product managers and sales teams, that is the real comparison point: one SaaS company is cutting staff to concentrate on growth areas, while another is trying to show it can scale by extracting more from the teams already inside the building.