File Photo: CFP

Employment-focused social media platform LinkedIn plans to phase out the company's local jobs app InCareer in China before August 9, and cut payrolls in the country after encountering "fierce competition" on the market, the company said in a statement sent to the Global Times on Tuesday.

"Though InCareer experienced some success in the past year thanks to our strong China-based team, it also encountered fierce competition," company CEO Ryan Roslansky said in an email to LinkedIn employees.

Managerial teams from the company will discuss the implications of the changes, including the discontinuation of some products and engineering teams in China and the downsizing of corporate, sales, and marketing groups.

LinkedIn said it will continue to have a presence in China and will shift its local business focus to assisting companies operating in China in finding, hiring skilled international talent and market their products and services overseas.

The reshuffle comes as no surprise and is seen as almost inevitable as LinkedIn "has not done a good job" in localization to meet local user habits and China's fast-changing mobile internet environment, Liu Dingding, a veteran internet industry observer told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Although LinkedIn launched a mobile terminal after entering China, the terminal is only a transplant of the PC terminal, and it has not done a good job in improving adaption and functions based on small screens, Liu said.

Its user-base and popularity has remained limited compared with market rivals in China, according to insiders.

A Shanghai-based human resource recruiter surnamed Li told the Global Times on Tuesday that the posts and recruiting information in LinkedIn are mainly focused on foreign companies operating in China, which only reaches a small user base.  

A report by the Internet Recruitment Industry Research Report issued by Aurora Mobile in 2020 showed that LinkedIn ranked near the bottom in a list of users' awareness and usage rates. It attracted only 3.3 percent in usage rate, far below the 69.3 percent for 58.com, and 47.4 percent for BOSS Zhipin.

Prior to the latest move, LinkedIn had been downsizing its operations in China. In October 2021, LinkedIn China announced that it would shut down the user-generated content publishing and interaction, as well as some core application functions of the workplace social networking platform, according to media reports.

China's Internet recruitment industry is likely to experience a rapid growth this year. According to the data of iiMedia Research, China's Internet recruitment industry will have a year-on-year growth rate of 15.1 percent in 2023, the highest growth in the past five years.