Changes to LinkedIn’s bonus program reflect HR’s emphasis on individual performance

Company performance will no longer help determine most employee bonuses at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn employees’ end-of-year bonuses will be determined entirely by their individual performance starting in 2027, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider. This is a shift from the career social networking platform’s current pay-for-performance structure, which awards workers based on a combination of individual and company performance. Employees with sales quotas are exempted from the change, according to the memo from LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero.

“We’re updating our bonus plan to create a more direct connection between individual performance and bonus payouts,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Business Insider.

The move by LinkedIn is part of a broader shift by tech companies to reward individual top performers, rather than the workforce as a whole.

Incentivizing individuals. Changes made to Google’s and Amazon’s bonus programs last spring similarly reflected shifts in how the companies tie individual performance to compensation.

Google said it would allocate a higher share of its budget for bonuses and equity to top performers, while slightly reducing this compensation for lower-performing employees. Around the same time, Amazon tweaked its compensation program to give higher pay to workers who had received the retailer’s top performance rating for four consecutive years.

Such changes were reflective of CEOs’ desire to prioritize cost optimization and productivity, Brent Cassell, VP, advisory with research firm Gartner, told HR Brew at the time.

These priorities remain top-of-mind for many corporate leaders in 2026. The CFO of LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, said in April she expects headcount to decline this year as the tech firm emphasizes “pace and agility.”

Employers do more with less as budgets moderate. Recent surveys suggest total rewards departments are planning to grant more moderate raises and bonuses than they have in years past as a result of economic and geopolitical uncertainty.

This also means HR departments are looking for ways to differentiate pay based on employees’ individual performance, rather than granting across-the-board increases (sometimes known as “peanut butter pay”).

One way to do this is by rewarding workers with “scarce skills,” consultants with firms Marsh and Korn Ferry told HR Brew in recent months.

“It’s not just who got your highest performance rating. It’s really taking those other good factors into consideration and making sure that you’re rewarding and retaining the people that fit the various buckets in alignment with that strategy,” John Legg, US commercial leader for Marsh Workforce & Rewards, said in September.

AI is increasingly playing a role in how some companies reward individual performance. Meta, Accenture, and KPMG are among the organizations that now incorporate AI usage into the performance review process.

One-quarter of HR professionals surveyed in August said AI proficiency factored into raises, promotions, and bonuses at their organizations, according to a report recently published by financial services talent firm Selby Jennings.