Despite lockdown, some cos keep hiring buzz on

Amid the buzz about layoffs and salary cuts, many companies are not only pledging to not lay off employees, they are also going ahead with their hiring plans. With face–to–face interactions out of question due to the lockdown, the companies are making the most of tech tools like Blue–Jeans, Zoom, Slack and Webex to recruit and onboard.

E–commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart, chipmakers Micron and Intel, Pegasystems, Oppo, financial services players like Arcesium and Blackhawk Network, digital transformation players like Brillio, and life sciences company Indegene are all bullish about hiring in India.

Intel India's country head Nivruti Rai said the company is continuing with its hiring. Micron India managing director Anand Ramamoorthy said the company will honour all the 150 offers it made in December and continues to hire selectively for critical functions.

"We have onboarded 50 staff in last two weeks, all virtually, and expect to double this by mid May," Ramamoorthy said. Micron, which has around 1,200 employees in India, also gave a Covid–19 allowance of Rs 25,000 each to 70% of its employees below a certain salary level.

Amazon, which employs over 62,000 people in India, said the company is continuing to hire for all open jobs across the country. A Flipkart spokesperson said: “We have hired additional workforce in our supply chain and are seeking to hire for our last mile delivery as well.”

Manish Gupta, CEO, Indegene, said that since the Covid–19 situation erupted, they are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration by the life sciences industry towards digital and non–personal engagement with healthcare practitioners to minimise any disruption in the continuity of information dissemination. This increase in demand for digital services is pushing Indegene to ramp up capacities. It plans to hire a slew of professionals, including graphic designers (InDesign), scientific writers, project managers, scientific editors, full–stack engineers, and HTML and business analytics professionals.

Suman Reddy Eadunuri, India MD, Pegasystems, which has about 1,600 employees across Hyderabad and Bengaluru, said the company has been continuously hiring through the lockdown.