Zomato Starts ‘Talent Directory’, Founder Deepinder Goyal Requests Employers to Hire Company’s Laid-Off Staff

After laying off thousands of employees in the last few weeks, large startups have begun outplacement activities to help them find new jobs.

In May alone, startups, including Swiggy, Zomato, Lendingkart, Ola, Cure.fit, WeWork India, ShareChat and Uber India among others, laid-off employees. Companies have now calibrated their recruitment staff to create outplacement cells, sharing resumes of employees across the hiring network, while holding one-on-one counselling sessions.

Foodtech unicorn, Zomato, which laid off around 13 per cent of its workforce is providing its affected employees with an outplacement team and has developed a database called ‘Zomato Talent Directory’ for absorption by other employers after its huge curtailment in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and drying up revenues.

Talking about his forum in his tweet on Saturday, Zomato’s founder & CEO Deepinder Goyal requested all organisations hiring to review the directory. He said that Zomato had been built by some of the most passionate people. “We are deeply grateful to have had these folks as part of our journey. And we assure you, you will be too. If you need a more curated/filtered list, please write to us at talentdirectory@zomato.com,” Goyal added in his tweet.

The forum lists out some of the ‘incredible people’ that have helped build Zomato, The employees who were asked to leave the company belonged to various teams including content, management and marketing etc.  Each of their profiles on the directory details the strengths and job roles of the respective associate at Zomato, together with their LinkedIn account and Resume.

Besides the layoffs and salary cuts, Zomato had also announced before that work from home, partially or fully, would be a permanent policy for the company.

Zomato’s business has had a huge drop with the restaurant industry alone to contract by 25 to 40% as customers remain skeptical about eating out due to safety concerns and the only business is that is coming in from the limited home deliveries.

“Multiple aspects of our business have changed dramatically over the last couple of months and many of these changes are expected to be permanent. While we continue to build a more focused Zomato, we do not foresee having enough work for all our employees,” said the company’s communication to laid-off employees.

Considering the spree of layoffs, start-ups are going an extra mile facilitating the placement of laid-off staff, an action which is gaining momentum. Besides Zomato, startups which include Cure.fit and Swiggy have also been involved in a similar exercise of helping out laid off staff to find suitable employment. Spreading a word across the hiring network, building up resumes, offering counselling sessions have been some of the efforts initiated by startups to offer a helping hand to those who have found themselves out of work during this tough period.