Jobs: It’s not all gloom and doom; these Indian start-ups are hiring

Over the past couple of weeks, while some unicorns and Big Tech companies have continued to lay off employees globally amid the challenging macro environment, several Indian start-up founders have been announcing openings and hiring plans.

In October alone, around 11,000 active monthly job openings were posted across Indian start-ups, according to data accessed from Xpheno, a specialist staffing company.

As of last quarter (ended September 30), Indian start-ups had 13,000 active job openings. Although overall openings have seen a downward trend over the past four-five quarters, Xpheno said that it has already started seeing November figures showing an uptick and expects a steady recovery.

The founders of upGrad, Dream11, Koo, Ezetap and spacetech start-up Kawa Space took to Twitter and LinkedIn recently to share their plans to expand teams. Some invited techies who had lost their jobs abroad to apply.

Over the past few months, more than 50,000 people have lost jobs across key Big Tech firms, including Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, HP and Google to name a few. Big tech firms' job openings in India are also down by nearly 90% of their typical hiring volumes.

Closer home, many start-ups, such as BYJU’s, Ola, Cars24, Chargebee, MPL, Udaan and Vedantu to name very few have laid off employees this year. The total count of laid-off employees across start-ups, as of November 29, stood at 17,800.

While mature start-ups continued to lay off employees to manage costs and survive the ongoing funding winter, early stage start-ups, which managed to keep raising funds, remain active in the hiring landscape.

“Start-ups are one of the key employers in India. Though funding activity overall remained low, early-stage start-ups at Series A and Series B levels accounted for the majority of the funding this year,” Kamal Karanth, Co-founder, Xpheno, told Moneycontrol. “For every start-up raising $10 million in a Series A round, they are hiring around 25 people for IT and tech roles. For $20 million funding rounds, they are adding anywhere over 40 people who are slightly senior, and offering an average package of Rs 30 lakh.”

He added that as much as the Big Tech layoffs are getting highlighted, at any given point these start-ups overall would have 2,000 vacancies for IT and tech specialists. And many of the founders of such early stage start-ups aren’t even active on social media websites to promote hiring.

“If you are a good cloud engineer, full-stack engineer with around 4-10 years of experience, you would easily get a job within 15 days of getting laid off,” he added.

Start-ups on a hiring spree 

Edtech unicorn upGrad will be adding 1,400 employees by March 2023, across verticals in offices in India and around the world.

“With respect to the prevailing scenario, we are receiving applications from across all markets regardless of locations and we continue to evaluate them for key roles within the organisation. Edtech has always attracted potential from diverse industries,” Saurabh Deep Singla, CHRO, upGrad, told Moneycontrol.

He added, “Right now, we are primarily hiring in India, with the roles spread across all the business units. The majority will be faculty, trainers and experts followed by sales & marketing, content, delivery, and learning experience, and not confined to a specific skill set or industry.”

Twitter has fired an estimated 8,100 people as of November 14, according to Moneycontrol Research and other media reports. Now, home-grown microblogging site Koo’s co-founder Mayank Bidawatka wants to hire some of those fired Twitter employees.

“Very sad to see #RIPTwitter and related # to this going down. We'll hire some of these Twitter ex-employees as we keep expanding and raise our larger, next round,” Bidawatka had posted on Twitter.

“They deserve to work where their talent is valued. Micro-blogging is about people power. Not suppression,” he added, taking a dig at Elon Musk’s changes at the organisation.

Koo is currently expanding to global markets eyeing an opportunity amid the ongoing turmoil at Twitter.

“Our product and tech will continue to operate out of our headquarters in Bangalore. Our plans on expanding in the US will focus on bringing together communities to build trust and safety, hiring natives who understand the law of the land,” Bhupendra Joshi, Koo’s Head of People Function, Organization Development and Talent Management, told Moneycontrol.

“With the global market expansion for Koo and the subsequent support, we may grow another 25-30%, especially in the space of monetisation, tech and community & operations,” he added.

Harsh Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Dream11, urged Indian tech talent, especially those on H-1B visas who were laid off in the US, to come back home. The fantasy gaming unicorn currently has openings across design, product and tech teams, Jain added.

“With all the 2022 Tech layoffs (52,000+!) in the US, please spread the word to remind Indians to come back home (specially those with visa issues) to help Indian Tech realise our hyper-growth potential in the next decade!” he said in a LinkedIn post.

“We at Dream Sports are a profitable, $8 Billion Co with 150 Million+ users and 10 kickass portfolio companies in Fantasy Sports, NFTs, Sports OTT, FinTech, Sports Experiences etc (Dream11, RARIO, FanCode, DreamPay, DreamSetGo) who are constantly looking for great talent, specially with leadership experience in Design, Product & Tech!,” he added.

Queries sent to Dream11 for more details on hiring plans didn’t elicit any response at the time of publishing.

Payments start-up Ezetap will be adding more than 100 employees in the next three months. Commenting on the roles Ezetap is hiring for, Swaroop Kanaparthi, Senior Manager, Talent & Culture, told Moneycontrol, “It spans every department, like tech, quality assurance, programme management, products, everything. And we are actually getting into a new segment of the market. And for that we’re actually looking for sales guys as well.”

Ezetap will be hiring people with around 5-7 years to up to 10 years of experience.

Mumbai-based Kawa Space, too, is looking to double its core technology team. “We are looking for space system engineers — people with advanced mathematics and physics degrees. We are a team of 24 right now. In core technology roles, we will double the team in three months,” Kris Nair, Founder and CEO, Kawa Space, told Moneycontrol.

Skills in demand and falling pay packages 

According to Xpheno, the demand for mid-senior to senior level talent is currently high. Job opportunities at the entry level remain low to moderate across the start-ups seen scouting for talent.

Experienced talent accounts for over 65 percent of the current demand. In terms of expertise, the demand for analytical skills, database skills, software development and engineering roles remain prominent, with nearly 70 percent of the active demand seeking these skills with experience.

Full Stack Engineers, Senior Software Engineers, Product Managers and Programme Managers are among the top roles in demand.

However, in FY23, these opportunities come with a caveat. Given the current market and talent pipeline availability, start-ups are looking to onboard talent for these skills at pay packages 12-18 percent lower than in FY22.

Ease in talent supply

Until a few months ago, the tech ecosystem globally was grappling with supply side challenges due to high attrition rates and a shortage of skilled tech talent. That situation seems to have started improving now.

“The current availability of tech talent in the market, driven by layoffs and manpower corrections, has start-ups interested. The availability and easier access to top tech talent from tier-1 employers in the market has reactivated hiring action for certain skills and roles at start-ups,” said Xpheno’s Karanth.

“Layoffs across industries have opened a vast pool of talent and we are evaluating their candidature from the same lens as we would have done in a conventional setting. Recruiters are being empathetic and fair to the candidates,” said upGrad’s Singla.

Koo’s Joshi added, “We see this as an opportunity to hire the best tech talent. India is a young country with an extremely talented workforce, it is essential to channelise this talent in the right direction. We are open to hiring talent with a massive scale of operations experience.”

The availability of specialised and skilled talent is also helping companies develop new solutions and strengthen offerings.

“We believe in focusing on the skills of employees. Being in the edtech sector, there is always room for growth from the technology standpoint. With the availability of skilled tech talent, we are now exploring roles and profiles to enhance and fortify our solutions and also provide our learners with the best and most enriching experience,” Singla added.