Microsoft-owned LinkedIn laid off more than 500 employees, including engineers, on Monday in its second round of job cuts this year as the social media network grapples with a slowdown in hiring, a person familiar with the matter said.

The cuts, which affect 2.5% of the 20,000-strong staff, add to the tens of thousands of job losses this year in the technology sector amid an uncertain economic outlook.

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Billionaire Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) recently introduced a new job-hiring feature that allows verified organisations to post job listings on their profile. X has entered the domain of professional networking with a beta version of hiring, in a bid to challenge professional websites like LinkedIn.

Now, reacting to a post by a Twitter user, Ian Zelbo, who wrote, “Is there anything worse than LinkedIn?”

Replying to the post, the billionaire wrote on X, “People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed. We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.”

In another comment, Mr Musk wrote, “LinkedIn is actually the most cringe platform on the internet.”

See the post here:

People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed.

We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2023

The post soon went viral and social media users were quick to react. A user wrote, “The worst part is people just making things up! I’ve seen a lot of people use titles on LinkedIn that don’t even exist and couldn’t be further from what they actually do at the company. like – being responsible for something doesn’t make you “head of” it lol.”

“Make LinkedIn irrelevant. Did you know that they force the pronouns on everyone even if you don’t opt in for it? It’s hidden outside the US, of course, because they know it doesn’t fly elsewhere,” another user wrote.

“The App is as rigid as the old phones that never made it to this day,” the third user wrote.

Meanwhile, the billionaire hinted about introducing the job-hiring feature in May. In response to a user’s suggestion that Twitter includes dating services, Mr Musk said, “Interesting idea, maybe jobs too.” This also appears to be a step towards the platform becoming the everything app that Elon Musk previously stated.

As per a July report in TechCrunch, Twitter made its first acquisition since Mr Musk bought the platform, a job-matching tech start-up named Laskie in May. It is likely that the acquisition helped the company in creating and releasing the new feature. A US-based media company WorkWeek, has been using the feature for a month. Its CEO Adam Ryan took to the platform to share the new feature and took a dig at Mark Zuckerberg’s newly launched Twitter-rival Threads.