Even as the Indian e-commerce industry is growing at 35 per cent annually, job opportunities are witnessing a huge growth.

According to global recruitment and consulting firm Randstad, hiring is likely to increase by 30 per cent in the next two years.

Recruiters also believe that though India has been late to enter e-commerce, it is catching up fast with global players such as Amazon.com, Walmart.com and eBay.

“We see demand coming in both from Indian online start-ups and e-commerce multinationals entering India, as well as their back-office operations supporting global business. Companies are looking for people in functions such as IT, search engine marketing, analytics, back-office, marketing, online merchandising, content writers and even stylists, photographers and fashion designers,” said E. Balaji, CEO, Randstad.

Across categories

While travel portals dominated the e-commerce industry a year ago, e-tailers such as Flipkart, Myntra.com, Fashionandyou, Jabong.com and Yebhi.com are busy increasing their employee strength as they chalk out aggressive expansion plans.

Fashion portal Myntra.com has increased its headcount almost five times to 1,100 this year from a mere 200 employees last year. Fashionandyou has 1,500 employees at present and plans to add around 300-400 in the next 12 months. Flipkart's employee strength went up more than three times to 5,000 from just 1,500 last year. “This year, we plan to hire another 500. We will be focusing on a good mix of mid- and entry-level positions. However, we will be very selective in hiring some strategic senior-level management positions as well,” said Pooja Gupta, Vice-President (Human Resource), Myntra.

Technology, buying and merchandising and cataloguing are all key functions that are growing, but the biggest growth areas will be customer service and delivery. These functions are directly affected by volumes and contribute directly to customer experience, online businesses say.

Talent, pay

“Typical fresher packages are around Rs 2-3.5 lakh per annum for roles like customer service representatives. For other management and technical roles, the starting package would be anywhere between Rs 8 lakh and Rs 14 lakh per annum,” Randstad’s Balaji aid.

Manish Tayade, founder of Mumbai-based recruitment firm Reliable Manpower Services (RMS), said most businesses are going to top engineering, design and management schools on the first day of campus hiring.

“Besides technology quotient on data structures, algorithms, logical and creative thinking and problem solving capacity, recruiters also look for passion for sales, ability to convince people virtually, vision and knowledge of the market,” Tayade said.

With regard to HR, Myntra’s Gupta said the lack of ready talent is a major challenge as the industry is relatively new. She also stressed that despite this, attrition is very low.

priyanka.pani@thehindu.co.in

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