Eyeing job automation, Zomato lays off 540 employees

Online food delivery chain Zomato Saturday laid off 541 employees or 10% of its total strength as it looks to more automation of jobs.

The company, however, said it would organise a job fair to help those retrenched find employment and would also extend insurance support to them until January 2020.

“Over the last few months, we have seen our technology products and platforms evolve and improve significantly. We have dramatically improved the speed of service resolution, such that now only 7.5% of our orders need support (down from 15% in March),” Zomato said in a statement.

All the employees fired on Saturday belonged to Zomato’s head office in Gurugram. Those fired, will get upto four months of severance package.

Over the last few months, improvement in its technology interface across functions has led to a reduction in support-related queries; this has led to several roles becoming redundant, prompting the company to layoff employees.

This has led to certain redundancies across its customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams, the company said.

It said the move is not due to any cost-cutting plan as it has hired over 1,200 people in its non-delivery teams and another 400 off-rolls positions.

“We have also created jobs for hundreds of thousands of delivery partners. We are still hiring in our technology, product and data sciences teams," Zomato said.

This is the second round of layoff by the company in the space of a month. In August, 60 employees in its customer support department were asked to go.

Back in 2015, the company had laid-off around 300 employees or 10% of its the then staff strength.

The move comes at a time when the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) has written to food aggregators charging them with indulging in unfair and anti-competitive practices, which were hurting business for eateries.

Founded in 2008, Zomato has presence in 24 countries.