Flipkart To Overhaul Its Campus Programme, Defers Joining Dates Of New Recruits

E-commerce giant Flipkart said that its campus recruitment programme will go through a comprehensive overhaul as part of its ongoing restructuring process, to ensure it is in line with the company’s new business structure and that their campus recruits start working towards the larger company goals from the first day itself.

This comes on the backdrop of the company’s deferring the joining dates of its new campus hires to December from the earlier committed timeline of June. Flipkart, known to be one of the highest paid employers in the market, has committed to pay an additional “joining bonus” of Rs. 1.5 lakh as compensation to all the affected students.

Explaining the reason behind deferring the joining dates, Flipkart said in its blog, “In the past few months, we’ve been working on restructuring our businesses to strike the right balance among key levers such as innovation, strategic execution, and operational excellence. The organisational restructuring involves the creation of new business units in some cases and mergers in other cases. For example, we integrated our engineering organization and created new units like the customer shopping experience group. This restructuring process is ongoing.”

Flipkart said that while deferring the joining dates, they have taken into consideration the students’ liability to repay their educational loans. “Loan repayment starts a year after the end of studies or six months after the student gets a job, whichever is earlier (this is known as ‘moratorium period’ or ‘repayment holiday’). Candidates can seek an extension on this period by submitting their revised offer letters to the bank,” the e-commerce company said.

The placement committee chairperson of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), which is among the affected institutes, wrote in an email to Flipkart’s CEO Binny Bansal and Chief People Officer Nitin Seth: “Talented students fresh out of campus, on the eve of starting successful careers, feel cheated out of multiple opportunities that the campus had to offer, through no fault of their own, just because they chose Flipkart.”

The premier institute has requested Flipkart to provide an undertaking signed by the CEO guaranteeing that each of the affected students will be absorbed no later than December. The institute committee has also asked Flipkart to either scale down the period of deferment or increase the quantum of compensation to reflect x per cent of their salary package.

“Rs 1.5 lakh for a period of seven months is, to put it mildly, utterly unacceptable,” the email from the IIM-A committee chairperson stated. The committee has also urged Flipkart that the payment of the compensation must commence on a monthly basis starting July and not as a lump sum amount as joining bonus or arrears.