IITs and IIMs may be wary of giving initial placement slots to e-commerce firms but most online start-ups do not place too much importance on hiring from the top institutes. For them, hiring right talent is the key — be it from the pool of experienced professionals in the market or freshers from other institutes.

Freecharge’s CEO Govind Rajan said, “We don’t go too much on pedigree but people with passion for solving a problem and intent to work hard. We have not hired much from IIT/IIMs and don’t intend to do that this year.”

E-commerce firms used to hire in large numbers from top B-Schools three-four years ago. “As the industry grew, we didn’t have a ready pool of talent to hire from the industry we were in, so that kind of forced our search towards the B-Schools to get the business up and running in a short time. These candidates could understand data and numbers very well,” says Shikha Taneja, HR Head, Shopclues. 

The focus on freshly minted B-School graduates has diminished as e-commerce start-ups matured and wanted experienced hands from the market. “It has become critical to hire people who come with some kind of perspective,” says Taneja. 

Shopclues in the last one year has added a number of experienced people to the team, creating new verticals. The company recently created a new vertical for customer experience headed by recently hired Madhur Chaturvedi, Vice-President. Chaturvedi comes with about 10 years of experience and was working with Oracle before joining Shopclues. 

Similarly, Cardekho, an entity of Jaipur-based firm GirnarSoft, focusses on hiring people from the internet industry with experience in various areas such as product, technology and operations.

“They may not be from the same verticals but they have lot of market and consumer understanding,” says Ankur Agarwal, CEO - Car Owners’ Business at GirnarSoft.   Online retail giant Amazon has been hiring top talent from IITs and IIMs but is now looking at hiring fresh graduates from other MBA institutes as well.

“We have also recruited people with online MBAs and have had very good experience working with them,” said Raj Raghavan, Director HR, Amazon India.

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