As the world of work evolves, we have ambitious goals guided by our company vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Nothing is more important to achieving these goals than having a world class team. Our annual workforce diversity report gives us an opportunity to share more about our continued commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and why it’s so important to our team’s success. Our work begins with the foundation of creating belonging for all employees, which is critical in unlocking the value of a diverse workforce. Upon this foundation, we invest in inclusive recruiting and retention practices and community-strengthening initiatives that have helped us build a more diverse and effective company.
In FY24, we adapted and evolved our strategy to increase impact. We’ve grown the number of employees engaged in inclusion and belonging work through increased manager engagement, initiatives focused on mid-career employees, and a revamped Employee Resource Group (ERG) Leadership Program. We’ve refined our approach to hiring by adapting the way we monitor talent pipelines and by partnering with external organizations to engage a diverse range of communities. While we are constantly seeking to improve the way we operate through the lens of talent, we remain grounded in our company vision and our belief that a diverse and inclusive global team is critical to pursuing that vision successfully.
Leading with belonging
To put it simply, our work in diversity, inclusion, and belonging seeks to empower every employee at LinkedIn to thrive, regardless of background or identity. In 2016 we introduced the concept of belonging as a key part of our culture, which has evolved to become the foundation of our work. Inclusion and belonging are often viewed as one, but we find it important to give space for each and their unique meanings.
We think of inclusion as a reflection of who has influence and power within an organization. Inclusive organizations are ones where the voices of influence reflect the diversity of the organization as a whole. They do this through company culture, systems, and the makeup of their leadership teams.
Belonging is much broader in scope. An environment of belonging is one where every employee can show up at work as their authentic selves. The research, published in Harvard Business Review and elsewhere, along with our own experience tells us that creating belonging for all employee groups is critical in unlocking the value of diverse teams, because it empowers people to contribute their authentic experiences and talents toward the broader goals of our company. The power and challenge of belonging is that it isn’t something anyone can create on their own. It takes everyone working together to build a supportive environment, both within teams and across the broader company.
Our belonging work begins with people managers, who play an outsized role in employee experience. We continue to invest in foundational inclusive leadership training, attended by over 80% of our people managers and 89% of our leaders at Director level or above. We’ve worked to extend manager impact by broadening their opportunities to engage. For example, we’ve expanded the ways in which we engage managers of program participants across growth and development opportunities and community-focused initiatives. By offering managers more insights into the experiences of employees from marginalized groups, we help them to become more effective and inclusive leaders not just to team members from those groups, but to their entire teams. We’re also supporting managers in navigating challenging workplace discussions as the world around us becomes ever more complex, with a focus on fostering belonging and supporting employee well-being. This includes offering leadership guidance and providing employee support resources.
We’ve undertaken new bodies of work focused specifically on belonging. Most of these efforts intersect across employee identity groups. For example, our work on socioeconomic inclusion has led us to insights into the experiences of employees who are among the first in their networks to work in corporate jobs. We use these insights to enhance our inclusive leadership and allyship initiatives, impacting employees across all racial, gender, and other identity lines. Other efforts focus on the unique experiences of specific demographic groups, like our LGBTQ+ allyship guides, which originated in India and have since scaled globally.
Equitable career growth and supportive community
In our efforts to empower all employees to thrive, we aim to retain our teammates across identity groups and ensure that employees of all backgrounds have the opportunity to grow into leadership positions. We hear again and again from our employees about the importance of connection and community, especially for those who may not have others with a common background on their teams. Our InspireHer initiative, for example, connects women of color across functions to build community. Our Catalyst program, now entering its sixth year, brings together employees from underrepresented racial groups across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
Every employee at LinkedIn can benefit from connection and community, and we’re consistently inspired by the work our twelve ERGs do to support their communities and allies. Sometimes this takes the form of building connections across groups, as in the “Cafecito” networking series co-hosted by Habibi (our ERG for employees who identify as Middle Eastern, Arab, and North African and their allies) and HOLA (our Latino and allies ERG). Other events focus on intersectional topics, like the “Authentic Expression” event celebrating ballroom culture put on by Out@In (our LGBTQ+ and allies ERG) and BIG (our Black and allies ERG). And we’re proud to share that our ERG community is growing. In fiscal year 2024 a dedicated group of employees laid the groundwork for our newest ERG, Shalom, which launched in September 2024 with the vision “To create belonging and inclusion for LinkedIn’s Jewish employees and allies.”
Our future talent
Looking to our future, we remain focused on building the systems and processes that increase our diversity through hiring. This systems-based approach is designed to create on-ramps for all qualified talent to enter our hiring process, and then to do all that we can to ensure a fair and equitable hiring process. We look at our hiring practices to identify where we may be missing top talent due to the talent pools we’re tapping into, the recruiting practices we have in place, or a lack of proper training for our interviewers and hiring managers. For example, we revamped our inclusive slates initiative in fiscal year 2024, using analytics to identify teams within the company that can benefit from more diverse candidate pipelines. We see that when we make our processes more inclusive and equitable, we give more qualified people an opportunity to demonstrate their potential impact at LinkedIn. This means the best candidates are more likely to progress through our process, and a more diverse group of hires in aggregate is the natural outcome. All of this is in pursuit of bringing in the diversity of thought, background, and perspective critical to achieving our ambition of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
Our FY24 representation
Returning to the importance of inclusion, we’ve placed an ongoing emphasis on growing our leadership teams in a way that reflects the broadest talent pools. This process has unfolded over a period of years, which is necessary when taking a systems-based approach rather than an individual-based approach. We see ups and downs year by year, but our steady focus has yielded results over time. Women in leadership was one of our first focus areas in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and we’re immensely proud of our progress. At the end of fiscal year 2024, 49% of our global leaders were women, with representation consistent across all three of our regions. This represents an increase from 46% last year and 42% in fiscal year 2020. In the U.S., Black leadership representation grew from 6.5% last year to 7%, nearly tripling since fiscal year 2020. Latino leadership representation declined slightly from 6.2% last year to 5.8%, but is up 70% since fiscal year 2020.
Our focus on our global leadership team led us to the commitment we made four years ago to double the absolute number of U.S. Black and Latino senior individual contributors (ICs), managers, and leaders by fiscal year 2025. We surpassed this goal for senior-level Black employees in fiscal year 2022 and ended fiscal year 2024 at 124% of our commitment. For senior-level Latino employees, we ended fiscal year 2024 at 82% of our commitment with one year remaining. While we’ve more than doubled the number of Latino leaders above the Director level over the past 4 years, we still have room to grow the senior IC and manager populations.
Expanding outside our company
Given our focus on creating economic opportunity, we think about diversity, inclusion, and belonging as a way of enhancing our workforce and empowering our over one billion members. Much of what we do in both these areas is supported by more than 30 partner organizations with whom we share common goals. Partners like Management Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT) play a crucial role in improving our talent pipeline. Others like Coqual help us build an environment of belonging by educating our leaders.
We also work with partner organizations to improve our product experience, advise our clients, and strengthen equity across the global professional landscape. LinkedIn’s Founders Initiative, for example, offers mentorship opportunities and resources to emerging startups, fostering strong relationships within a diverse founder ecosystem. In Australia, we recently launched our first Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). This plan, developed in partnership with Reconciliation Australia, outlines our commitment to promoting equity and reconciliation with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community through the pillars of relationships, respect, opportunities, and governance.
An ongoing commitment
Amid an evolving world of work, we’ve never been more excited about our opportunity to empower the world’s professionals. We’ve never had more conviction that we need a world class team to do it. That means a team that reflects the member base we serve, and a team that doesn’t miss opportunities to hire exceptional people. It also means a team where every employee can experience the sense of belonging necessary to do their very best work. In the fiscal year ahead, we’re doubling down on strengthening this foundation of belonging. We’re further investing in the inclusive leadership skills of our people managers, expanding the way we activate allies across the business, and engaging senior leaders in forums and leadership labs focused on creating a top-down culture of belonging. In parallel, we’re tailoring our inclusion recruiting strategies to the unique needs and challenges of our business functions and continuing to invest in employee retention with added emphasis on employees new to LinkedIn. As we reflect on the past year, we look to the future with a sense of humility in knowing our work is far from finished and with a deep commitment to the path ahead.
