LinkedIn InCareer

~ the eulogy ~

LinkedIn entered China in 2014 with a localized site at linkedin.cn, and it did the thing a foreign platform has to do there in order to stay. It censored. Content that would not clear was blocked inside the country, and over the years that meant academic accounts and activist profiles, then in 2021 the profiles of foreign journalists, with each blocking notice generating a news cycle in the countries where LinkedIn's several hundred million other members lived.

Seven years is a long run for an American social network in China and by the end it was the only one left. Google had taken search out in 2010. Facebook and Twitter were never allowed in at all. LinkedIn lasted because a professional network reads as less political than a general one, right up until somebody posts about something other than work.

In October 2021 LinkedIn announced it was closing the localized Chinese network, citing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements. The replacement arrived that December. InCareer kept the job listings and dropped everything else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the social part removed ~

InCareer was a job board wearing a LinkedIn badge. There was no feed and nothing a user could publish that another user would ever read. That is the shape a foreign platform takes when it wants to keep operating under Chinese content rules without staffing a censorship desk, because if nobody can publish anything then there is nothing to moderate.

It also removed every reason to open the app on a day you were not looking for work. What makes a professional network defensible is the profile and the connection graph sitting underneath it, and a listings app has neither of those, which dropped InCareer into direct competition with the Chinese incumbents on their own terms while carrying none of its parent's advantages.

~ the numbers ~

By March 2023 InCareer had 959,600 monthly active users. 51job had 18.5 million that month and Boss Zhipin 17.3 million, with Liepin behind them on 6.7 million. A million monthly users is a healthy app in most countries and a rounding error in a Chinese hiring market where the top three had an order of magnitude on you and a decade of head start.

~ 9 august 2023 ~

The announcement came on 9 May 2023 from chief executive Ryan Roslansky, and it was not really a China announcement. LinkedIn was cutting 716 roles worldwide, mostly across its sales organization, and the China product and engineering teams went out with them. Fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate were the words used. InCareer got a three month runway to the 9 August close.

LinkedIn did not leave the country. Its talent and learning businesses stayed on, aimed at Chinese companies hiring and advertising outside China, which is a different product sold to a different customer with no consumer app attached to it. The last Western social network with a Chinese login screen closed twenty months after opening, and the version that closed had already had the social network taken out of it.

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