E-commerce Talent On Hire, Again?

Over 15,000 employees, like files from the computer, have been deleted by their e-commerce employers over last 20 months or so. That’s because either businesses went extinct or their employees suffered the ‘restructuring’ pang, courtesy – the drug that kept their spirits ‘high’ became elusive. Now as we expect an uptick in sane capital, would the gold rush in attracting talent stage a comeback? Listen in to India’s top e-commerce headhunters.

- Sandeep Soni

New market, new challenges, new learnings, new career paths and new opportunity for wealth creation were reasons that drove people across hierarchies from CXOs to delivery boys - towards e-commerce. The volume hiring had happened at the mid to junior levels as there are only so much numbers of vacancies at the CXO level. The impact of top hi-profile exits like Flipkart’s Punit Soni, Mukesh Bansal, Sanjay Baweja and Snapdeal’s Anand Chandrasekaran, Aakash Moondhra, Amitabh Misra or Ola’s Rajiv Bansal, Raghuvesh Sarup and Anuj Bhargava, cascaded onto mid and junior level people who either followed into their footsteps or were laid off by the companies. Similar trend swept through other start-ups at different growth stages.

Elusive CXOs

But staffing solutions company, TeamLease Services, believes that layoffs have already bottomed out, primarily after demonetization phase in Q3 of last fiscal year. “In Q4 FY17, the hiring at mid and junior level again went up. At the junior level, going back to e-commerce isn’t that much of a risk as people switches jobs even for a small hike. If a company doesn’t do well then they will move back to the previous company,” says Ashok Reddy, Managing Director and Co-Founder, TeamLease Services. The challenge is about attracting the top cream. “Top talent is now once bitten, twice shy. They are trying to revive themselves after going through a bad phase. It would be a challenge because senior people don’t want to change job often,” adds Reddy. That’s probably because switching jobs at the CXO level don’t add weight to their resumes.