Hiring activities are expected to grow by over 30 percent in the ecommerce sector and help create up to 50,000 jobs in the next 2-3 years, according to PTI. Human resources consultancy Randstad India mentions that hiring in the space is likely to rise by 20-30 percent in next few years due to entry of domestic online start-ups and e-commerce MNCs into India and setting up of back-office operations of global businesses in the country.
Unison International, an HR firm, says that hiring has been rather slow in the e-commerce space over last couple of years, but recruitments may grow rapidly now by 33 percent over the previous year owing to the entry of retail brands in the online space. The findings of Jigsaw Academy predicts that the e-commerce industry may create 15,000-50,000 jobs in the next three years for data analysts professionals alone.
“The companies are hiring aggressively and are also offering lucrative salaries to attract the right analytics talent,” said Gaurav Vohra, CEO, Jigsaw Academy. The sector has just seen one of the largest merger deals between homegrown e-commerce majors Myntra and Flipkart, while another domestic firm Snapdeal has also got new investors.
“The deal will only make Myntra’s fashion business stronger and we will target more aggressive scale – to this end, our hiring will continue to be extremely aggressive but selective,” said Pooja Gupta, VP-HR, Myntra.
According to an Amazon official, the industry is growing rapidly and so amazon has also grown exponentially over the last 11 months and will continue to see growth.
Pallav Sinha, CEO, HR consultancy MeraJob India said that the sector is clearly poised for explosive growth. While private equity investments in e-commerce companies is one of the reasons for the expectation of this growth, the primary drivers are – proliferation of mobiles; development of digital payment platforms and social media usage.
“Hiring in e-Commerce is therefore poised for growth that could match the job creation rate in mobile telecom in early 2000’s. Fiscal 2014-15 would be the tipping-point in this hiring growth in India,” he stated.
“Hiring will continue aggressively for delivery staff, digital marketing professionals, and for sales, operations, IT and data analytics across levels,” Sinha said. Experts also observed that e-commerce players give preference to people from top rated management institutes. Moorthy K Uppaluri, CEO, Randstad India, said: “There is a positive hiring outlook in this space particularly for tier 1 B-Schools and Engineering colleges since recruiters are looking for top notch talent.”
The e-commerce companies are also focussing on hiring lateral talent from top IT companies and niche retail focused firms for their technology functions while they hire from FMCG, consumer durables entities to fill in marketing and logistics positions, the HR firm said. Besides, Vohra noted that growth industries inevitably attract youth and that significant part of the hiring in e-commerce is at entry or junior levels which accounts for a relatively younger profile of workforce.
“With global e-commerce giants entering India, demand for talent will increase along with compensation for top executives,” Uppaluri said. “The management and technical roles recruited from top B-schools and engineering campuses, have a starting package between Rs 8 to 12 lakhs per annum while senior executive compensations range from Rs 50 to 75 lakhs with attractive employee stock options plans (ESOPs),” he added.
