Co Founder and CEO of Swiggy, Sriharsha Majety shared companies’ hiring plans at Gigabytes, its hyperlocal innovation summit.

"If some of our growth estimates continue, it will not be too many years before we can be the third-largest source of employment in the country,” said Majety.

The foodtech unicorn which has 2.1 lakh monthly active delivery staff and about 8,000 corporate employees on its payroll plans to hire three lakh people in 18 months. This ambitious hiring plan is aligned with Swiggy’s business vision to have 100 Mn customers transacting with it over 15 times a month in the next 10-15 years. 

Currently valued at $3.3 Bn, Swiggy operates in around 500 cities in India and the platform witnesses around 500 million orders every year. Recently, the company also shared its plan of expanding its cloud kitchen business and plans to open 'pods', where several restaurants use one common kitchen and enables food deliveries to be done in 10 minutes.

While the plan of hiring 3 lakh employees in 18 months indicates more employment generation, how does Swiggy meet this target would be interesting to follow. Currently, it is the IT major TCS with a staff strength of 4.5 lakh employees which is the largest private-sector employer. A company like TCS offers many employee benefits and has established a strong employer brand to attract the best and the most of talent. But what approach would Swiggy apply? Given that Swiggy is looking to create more blue collar jobs and delivery personnel who are paid depending on the work done, the hiring and talent management strategies will be quite different. 

In case of hiring for delivery executives, Swiggy competes with Zomato that had 2.3 lakh delivery executives in September, and Flipkart that has 1 lakh delivery executives, among other online delivery unicorns. 

Image Credits: Fortune