Sales are soaring in the second wave of the pandemic and hence online grocery delivery and logistics firms are looking forward to increase the employee count to capitalize on the same.
Increased Hirings As Demand Soars
Since the month of February, at least 5,300 people mostly across its warehouse and delivery teams have been hired by BigBasket. While the rival Grofers has added over 2,000 people for these segments since the beginning of the year.
“Over the next 12 months we aim to add over 500 people across our tech, product, data sciences, supply chain operations, product and growth marketing, category management, and central growth team which will be responsible for enabling various parts of the business,” said a Grofers spokesperson.
In addition to these employees, Grofers also added 390 people to their payroll for multiple jobs. The company is also looking to grow this number by hiring more technology and warehouse.
Service providers such as Rapido including BigBazaar, BigBasket and Reliance Retail among its customers have also added more than 60 people to many roles such as technology, product and data over the past few months and plan to integrate at least 50 more in the coming months.
While Grofers did not disclose the salaries of its warehouse and supply chain managers, BigBasket said their salaries were between Rs. 18,000-30,000.
BigBasket saw a 30 percent increase in the number of orders.
“Demand is obviously very high but our delivery capacity has increased by 30 percent from February to May,” said T. Hari, chief executive of BigBasket, told Moneycontrol that the company would continue to employ more people in line with business growth in the coming months. “Employees will always articulate business needs.
On the other hand Grofers claims that many sectors have seen a different amount of spike. While integrated foods including ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook segment has seen an 80 percent increase in the number of orders, cold food has seen a 500 percent increase since February.
Aravind Sanka, founder of Logistics and bike-taxi startup Rapido said over the past three weeks the company has added at least 25-30 clients to its clothing business. Even the volume of orders has grown by 35-40 percent since February.
Before the epidemic Rapido used to get 25 percent of its business from the installation of items while the rest came from a bicycle taxi. However, in the last one year, the equation has changed by more than 75 percent of its business accounted for logistics. It delivers food and food to customers on behalf of its customers.
Hirings is driven by products and category expansion
“Our hiring is driven by two major things – product development and new sector development,” Sanka told Moneycontrol, adding that the epidemic may have increased the number of orders but the company is increasing staff as it begins to introduce new sectors such as autorickshaws as well.
Following an increase in the number of Covid cases, many states such as Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan have announced closures where e-commerce companies are allowed to deliver only essential goods.
Instead of venturing outside of their homes, many are now resorting to buying groceries online and this has worked wonders for online grocery firms such as BigBasket and Grofers.
This was about essentials, but even marketplaces Amazon & Flipkart are ramping up their facilities to cater to the rise in the demand of online groceries, despite getting almost 90 percent of their business from non-essential categories.
While Flipkart declined to comment for the story earlier in May, the company said it was strengthening its grocery infrastructure to cater to demand across India. Flipkart plans to further expand its fulfilment centres capacity for grocery by over 8 lakh square feet during this quarter across Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai among other cities.