Snapdeal hones its people strategy to take on e-comm rivals

Snapdeal is sharpening its arsenal with a focused people strategy, which it expects will boost its GMV (total value of goods sold) this March.

With 2 lakh sellers on its marketplace, Snapdeal has already achieved $4.5 billion in GMV in the pre-Diwali period. It is now looking to make good its co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl’s claim last year, that the company will outperform Flipkart’s GMV in FY 2016.

While Snapdeal continues to make parallel investments in infrastructure, technology innovations and acquiring top talent, it has rolled out a people performance and management system called GROW that spans the entire employee lifecycle of its 7,000-strong workforce. GROW is an acronym for Goal setting, Regular feedback & appraisal, Own your development and Win with the company.

“GROW is a trimester-based, open and transparent system which aligns our entire workforce with the organisation’s vision, strategy and goals,” Saurabh Nigam, Vice-President of Human Resources at Snapdeal, told BusinessLine .

“An agile goal setting and appraisal cycle which lets the company and the employee course correct every four months helps the company keep pace with the changing dynamics of the industry and quickly aligns the entire team in that direction,” he explained.

It is mandatory for managers and employees at Snapdeal to meet every two months, exchange feedback and work toward individual improvement.

The Snapdeal Academy has trained 2,400 employees over the last few months in behavioural and functional skills crafted for each level. The First Time Manager trains those who get into supervisory roles for the first time.

“To close the loop, we have an online portal for rewards (monetary and non-monetary) and recognition where anyone can recognise the other’s work. Each function defines their own rewards, nominates a person and a jury decides on the winners. This way, the entire company gets to see who the winners are,” added Nigam.

Hiring blueprint Plans are underway to hire 500 people in technology, product development, supply chain, marketing and category management by March. There has also been a series of top level hires attracted from Coca-Cola, Bharti Airtel, Cisco and P&G.

These include Idi Srinivas Murthy as Senior VP-Marketing, Anand Chandrasekaran as Chief Product Officer, Gaurav Gupta as VP-Engineering and Amit Choudhary as Senior VP-Corporate Finance.

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