Post Content
LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky has stepped down from his position as CEO after six years, with the corporate social network’s chief operating officer (COO) Daniel Shapero taking over the top job, effective immediately.
Roslansky, however, will retain his position as executive vice president at Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. He is expected to oversee Microsoft’s core Office 365 apps in the expanded role, with Shapero likely reporting directly to him.
Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn’s senior vice president of engineering, is also transitioning to the role of Microsoft’s president of platform and digital work, while current LinkedIn vice presidents Erran Berger and Raghu Hiremagalur will take charge of the platform’s engineering functions.
The leadership transition at LinkedIn comes at a pivotal moment, as AI-driven disruption reshapes the jobs market and sparks mass layoffs by tech giants such as Meta and Oracle. As companies rethink hiring and workforce needs, LinkedIn’s role has also evolved from a glorified jobs board into a social network where executives share personal essays and post career advice while job-seekers navigate increased competition and algorithmic-driven visibility.
“The power of economic opportunity and the promise of LinkedIn has never been more important than it is today as the world is transformed by AI and professionals everywhere must transition along with it,” Shapero, the new CEO, wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday, April 22. “As I step into this role, similar to how I have approached new responsibilities in the past, I’ll start by learning and listening… connecting with our team, members, creators, and customers, each of whom make LinkedIn the platform that helps create economic opportunity,” he added.
“Dan has led sales, marketing, and product across the most important parts of this business. He knows our members, our customers, and carries the mission in a way that’s genuinely rare,” Roslansky wrote in a LinkedIn post.
LinkedIn’s revenue rose 11 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter, with the company’s memberships growing from 700 million to 1.3 billion under Roslansky’s six-year tenure as CEO, boosting annual revenue from roughly $8 billion to more than $17 billion.
Story continues below this ad
The platform could have a key part to play in Microsoft’s push to sell AI-powered products and services to businesses. This includes tools like 365 Copilot, which reportedly saw only three per cent of Office 365 users pay to use it by the end of 2025.
Who is Dan Shapero?
Shapero graduated from Johns Hopkins with a bachelor of science (BSc) degree in mathematics and statistics in 2000. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. During college, he founded an internet service called Collegiate Recruiting Technologies to help high school athletes through the college recruiting process.
Shapero worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company for more than three years, where he handled projects for a wide array of corporate and financial clients that were mostly in the technology, media, and telecommunications sectors. He later joined LinkedIn as global VP of sales in 2008, when the Great Recession rattled the global labour market.
Also Read | As AI use increases at work, many employees still choose not to use it: Gallup poll
Shapero has worked as LinkedIn’s COO for the past five years, leading teams across product, sales, operations, marketing, pricing, and customer support. He has served as advisor to several tech firms such as Dropbox and Fairboard. Shapero is also an angel investor who has bet on a range of startups such as Brightwheel, EdLyft, Springboard, Curated, Scoop, Latitude, Esusu, Truework, and Wealthfront, according to his official LinkedIn page.
Story continues below this ad
What are Shapero’s views?
In a 2024 interview with Bloomberg, Shapero said that he believes almost every role is going to be rewritten in the context of AI. “From engineers to salespeople, marketers, finance professionals to lawyers — everyone’s going to be leveraging AI in some way […] Whether or not all of these benefits translate into leisure time, or more focus on the parts of our job that we enjoy and inspire us, I think that remains to be seen,” he was quoted as saying.
When asked about the most important skills for an employee in the AI age, Shapero replied: “I would say, learn how to use the tools, try them out, and see what they can do. People who are comfortable with these tools — just like people who are comfortable with technology in general — are going to have opportunities.” “And as much as there’s going to be demand for technical skills, there’s going to be increased demand for human skills: communication and creativity,” he added.
Also Read | Is your job AI-proof? LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman on the future of work
On his vision for the future of LinkedIn, Shapero has previously said that there are many opportunities for one of the world’s biggest professional networking sites to leverage AI in their products. It appears that he strongly supports using AI in hiring, where LinkedIn’s products can help recruiters reach candidates by analysing users’ backgrounds, goals, and connections.
“I think the starting point is this all needs to be rooted in a goal of equity and meritocracy and ubiquity of opportunity. So that has to be the goal. And you need to start by putting measures and controls in place to make sure that as you’re using AI, you’re not introducing bias or you’re not narrowing the aperture of candidates to a subset of the people that are really capable of doing the job,” the new CEO was quoted as saying in a 2023 Fortune interview.
Story continues below this ad
An agentic AI tool called Hiring Assistant developed by LinkedIn has already seen early success among recruiters, as per a report by The Information. The AI agent allows recruiters to find and reach out to potential job candidates, using models from OpenAI and other AI providers to automate the work of manually searching through the platform to find people.
