In a move to remove unwanted workforce, Zomato, an online food delivery aggregator, has fired around 540 employees at the company’s head office in Gurugram across its customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams.
The company has extended 2-4 months of severance pay to employees laid off over the weekend.
The company said, “Today, we let go of 541 people (or 10% of Zomato’s strength) across these support teams, based out of our offices in Gurgaon.”
The reason behind the major lay off has stayed over the last few months in the platform when improvement in its technology interface across functions has led to a reduction in support-related queries.
Zomato, on the other hand, is an Indian restaurant search and discovery service provider, founded in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah.
It currently operates in 24 countries. It provides information and reviews of restaurants, including images of menus where the restaurant does not have its own website and also online delivery.
“Over the last few months, we have seen our technology products and platforms evolve and improve significantly. While the business has continued to grow consistently, this has led to an overall reduction in direct order-related support queries. We have dramatically improved the speed of service resolution, now only 7.5% of our orders need support (down from 15% in March),” the company added.
The company spokesperson said that post layoffs, the company’s employee strength is an estimated 5,000 people across the organisation.
In 2019, layoffs at Zomato affected 600 people across customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams, the spokesperson added.
“This year we have hired over 1,200 people in our 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,” the company further added.
Some of the foodtech giants that falls under the similar roof includes Swiggy, FoodPanda, Uber Eats, FoodPanda, Dineout, and many more.