Microsoft is expected to announce layoffs of 700 employees on Monday, according to some reports.
The HR department of the company has already reserved several conference rooms on the company’s campus to most likely announce the layoffs.
Microsoft currently has a staff of around 113,000, as revealed by the company, and figure was increased by around 5500 after acquisition of LinkedIn. However, the latest layoff is not related to LinkedIn’s acquisition, and is part of the plan – announced in June last year – to cut 2,850 jobs. In its annual report in June 2016, the company had said that it would prefer completing those cuts by June 2017.
The latest decision of layoff is not likely to have an impact on company’s operations. Most of the 2,850 roles to be cut by June this year have already been eliminated. The primary aim of these cuts is not to reduce costs of the company but to update skills in different units, says BusinessInsider citing a person familiar with the matter. The upcoming cuts would be spread across the company’s offices and business units including marketing, sales, finance, HR, engineering, and more.
According to experts, Microsoft may announce further cuts in near future. Such layoffs won’t affect Microsoft’s overall headcount as the company is still doing recruitment and over 1,600 job openings have been posted on LinkedIn.
In the past 3 years, several rounds of layoffs at Microsoft have been completed. In last fiscal year, the company had cut about 7,400 positions, while the largest ever layoff of 18,000 jobs was done in 2014.
