Life ain't easy for fresh graduates looking to work for fat paychecks at Indian e-commerce start-ups but for Flipkart employees, the going just got a lot tougher.
Flipkart has asked upto 1,000 employees to hand in their resignation or take a severance pay, the Economic Times reported, citing sources in the company's senior management team. Flipkart has said the move will impact employees who are "under-performing."
"The cleanup is a part of the process of making Flipkart a lean organisation," one of the people in ET said.
Flipkart employs about 30,000 people, and the cuts will impact about up to 3.3 per cent of its workforce. Earlier this week, its subsidiary Myntra bought online fashion portal Jabong for $70 million.
Flipkart is hardly the only Indian e-commerce player that has resorted to cutting its workforce after a period of easy money that led to over-hiring.
Earlier this year, Flipkart's rival Snapdeal put 200 employees on a "performance improvement plan." Restaurant discovery platform Zomato and Cardekho, an online auto classifieds provider, CarDekho have retrenched several hundreds employees.
Many startups have recently pulled or revoked campus job offers faced with a tighter fundraising environment as well as pressures to become more profitable
Last month, online grocery delivery provider, Grofers, said it would retrench about 10 per cent of its workforce and withdrew 67 job offers to campus graduates. Flipkart also delayed the joining dates for at least 17 graduates from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad in May. That led to some backlash from the campus hiring offices at IITs to demand disclose their sources of funding and balance sheets before they hired from campuses.