ShareChat lays off 101 employees
ShareChat has reportedly laid off 101 employees, or about a fourth of the workforce, as the regional social media firm expects the advertising market to be unpredictable this year.
The Twitter-backed firm sent an email to employees on early morning Wednesday informing them about the various cost-cutting measures. The five-year-old company had started monetizing the platform through advertising only in October last year. However, the Covid-19 pandemic led economic slowdown has severely hurt the advertising market.
The laid-off employees will have the option of taking a ‘garden leave’ of 2 months or half the salary for four months. Garden leave is a practice when a terminated employee stays away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. Apart from this, laid-off employees will get a 1-month ex gratia for every year that they have worked for the company.
Ankush Sachdeva, Co-Founder & CEO, ShareChat was quoted in media saying, “The impacted employees will continue to be covered by ShareChat’s health insurance policy until the end of the year, and added that the company will extend the timeline for the stocks employees own till the end of the year. This would mean the options that vest by the end of the year would continue to be retained by the employees.”
He further said, “We have to focus on our core product and feed recommendation is driven growth levers while scaling back on the others. We need to go back to our fundamentals in terms of only picking bets that move the needle for growth. We believe the Ad Market would remain unpredictable this year. We are streamlining our revenue teams to these new expectations.”