New Delhi: Weeks after ecommerce giant Flipkart delayed joining dates of students, grocery delivery start-up Grofers has gone one step further and has cancelled the joining letters of 67 students.
The company, funded by Softbank Corp and Tiger Global Management, said it will also lay off 10 per cent of its staff, blaming the adverse market conditions.
The firm cancelled letters of the students hired from National Institute of Technologies (NITs) at Allahabad and Surathkal; Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani and Goa campuses; and the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad. Students were left devastated and the social media flooded with the tweets against the act of Grofers.
This move comes a month after India’s largest shopping portal, Flipkart, delayed joining dates for 17 graduates from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, by six months. Flipkart has for this act promised a joining bonus of Rs.1.5 lakh to the affected students but no such compensation has come from Grofers yet.
Apart from the joining letters cancelation in a email by human resources head Rishi Arora to its employees, reported by ET, Grofers said it will be laying off few people in every department. The support & content department will be most affected by the company’s plans.
The laid off employees will be receiving a month's salary as severance pay.
Grofers currently has about 2,000 employees. This lay off comes six months after the company shut down operations in nine cities blaming the low adoption of its services. The cities where the services were shut include Mysuru, Coimbatore, Kochi, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Nashik, Rajkot, Ludhiana, and Visakhapatnam.
