Start-up biggies step up hiring
Edtech, logistics and gig economy to be key drivers
After a year of job uncertainty and salary cuts, the start-up ecosystem is stepping up its hiring plans as many large firms look to scale up their business. According to a survey by Scalar, venture capitalfunded start-ups, especially in edtech, logistics, and gig economy, will be key drivers of the job market in 2021.
Live learning platform Vedantu plans to hire 1,500 employees across all levels, with domain expertise in the fields of technology, product, finance, strategy and human resource this year.
“Due to the tremendous potential of online learning in current times, it is our duty to ensure that all students and teachers get perfect experience of our product. Hence, we are ramping up our hiring across domains from India’s premium B-schools and engineering institutes,” said Vamsi Krishna, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, Vedantu.
Mumbai-based edtech start-up Lido Learning is looking to hire close to 1,000 employees in the next one month. The recruitment will be diverse, spanning across roles like tutors, customer support personnel, and sales and marketing executives. This is in addition to building strength for the existing teams.
“There has been a big surge in start-up hiring in the past two-three months, and it is not only limited to fintech or edtech. All segments, including consumer tech, Saas (software as a service), gaming, and media tech, are now picking up,” said Anshul Lodha, regional director at global recruitment consultancy Michael Page.
The outbreak of Covid-19 impacted most start-ups as their business contracted and many had to resort to job cuts.
For instance, food tech platform Swiggy, which handed pink slips to over 1,400 employees after the pandemic broke out last year, has gone back to the 2019 hiring plans for the March quarter, with an increased focus on technology and product functions.
“Attracting the right talent in engineering, product, data science & ML is our primary focus while also strengthening our business category and supply chain teams for our new initiatives. This would be a mix of both entry-level roles (15-20 per cent) and lateral hires,” said Girish Menon, head of HR at Swiggy. The need to hire aggressively also comes on the back of fundraising that start-ups have seen amid rising demand. Walmart-backed Phonepe has managed to reach the milestone of 1 billion monthly payment transactions. Phonepe has about 700 positions to close in 2021. “Despite the lockdown, our headcount grew by 700 since the end of February 2020, taking our employee strength to 2,240,” said a spokesperson for Phonepe.