Since August 2015, eight of the poster-boys of the country’s e-commerce and technology ventures have reportedly trimmed close to 3,000 jobs because of reasons such as organisational restructuring, non-performance, scaling down of operations.
Online food-ordering company Zomato had asked nearly 300 of its employees in North America to leave in October 2015, after the firm restructured its operations to focus on increasing traffic on its platform. “The Urbanspoon acquisition taught us a lot about what works, and how things worked in the way that Urbanspoon used to run their business. Last year’s restructuring was a combination of the best of our knowledge and the best of Urbanspoon’s knowledge and processes,” a Zomato spokesperson said.
“The restructuring largely affected our content operations and community management teams in North America,” the spokesperson said, adding that the company did not expect any foreseeable job redundancies. Zomato acquired US-based food portal Urbanspoon in January 2015.
Consolidation in the sector is another key reason why experts believe companies will continue to rationalise costs, and to that effect, reduce jobs. Earlier this month, India’s largest app-based taxi-hailing service Ola laid off close to 700 employees of TaxiForSure (TFS), which it acquired nearly 18 months ago. At the time of the development, an Ola spokesperson had said that the cab aggregator has absorbed “as many TFS employees for open roles in Ola to support our growth.”
Till such a time when funds flowed freely from venture capitalists and angel investors, companies chased aggressive growth targets, and in that process, their expenses on human resources tended to be “irrational”, according to analysts.
“Resource management in any tech firm is dependent on how best the talent is utilised to optimally make use of the technological innovation. It is need-based and should be in sync with the immediate and holistic future goals of the company,” a spokesperson of food-tech company Foodpanda said.
“We are a tech based company which will always focus on innovating in the space. Owing to that, there are certain roles which would be redundant and hence would require a restructuring of the team. That being said, we also look at how best we can utilise brainpower in alternate business verticals and that is why a lot of talent has been recognised and integrated in various functions through the churn we have seen in the past,” the spokesperson said, adding that Foodpanda has an “optimally sized team at about 2,000 employees”.
In December 2015, Foodpanda laid off nearly 300 people across segments, representing 15 per cent of its total staff strength. The company had cited automation in order processing as the reason of firing these people then.
The reasons due to which people are losing their employment in the e-commerce and startup sector, also stand true for the information technology and the business process outsourcing sectors. Recently, several employees of Infosys Ltd were asked to leave due to their poor performance.
Source: The Indian Express