RIL softens hiring in retail, telecom, cuts duplication

Reliance Industries Ltd is rolling out a cost-efficiency drive across its units Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio Infocomm, reducing hiring, reviewing compensation benchmarks, and firing underperformers, multiple executives from the company and the wider industry said.

- Devina Sengupta, Suneera Tandon

 

The retail business wants to eliminate the duplication of roles that followed its recent acquisitions, while in telecom, most of its 5G network rollout is complete, the people said, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Reliance Retail and Jio had hired over the last year on a very large scale. They had recruited employees at higher-than-usual market value and now have been told by the top management to scale down. Those who are in the lower rung of performance may get retrenched," a company executive said.

The two companies have slowed down on their recruitment efforts and will only hire on a “need basis", said a second person, a senior consultant.

Reliance Retail employs 418,000 people, while Reliance Jio has over 80,000, many of them hired to fuel expansion in various retail formats and 5G networks.

“The large-scale hirings for 5G have happened, and more use cases are needed in the telecom business for the ramp-up to continue," said a third person, also an executive with Reliance.