Evan Vitale Consulting: Paytm sets its eyes on consulting companies to hire talented employees

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Paytm sets its eyes on consulting companies to hire talented employees – Economic Times

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BENGALURU: As the war for talent intensifies, ecommerce giant Paytm is stepping up its game. The Noida-headquartered firm has set its sights upon McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group and AT Kearney to poach employees who can bring their experience in consulting and leverage it towards innovation, operations and management of strategic tie-ups.

This recruitment approach comes at a time when Paytm is looking towards acquisitions across the local e-commerce space.

In the past five months or so, new roles in product business, merchant do-it-yourself and onboarding, digital media and goods have opened up at Paytm, inducing the company to identify employees at consulting firms who can take on the challenge of scaling up in an entirely new domain. Since January this year, almost 10 people have jumped ship from McKinsey, BCG and AT Kearney to join Paytm.

Following a recent partnership with InMobi and a focus on acquisitions in the local ecommerce space, it is perhaps natural that Paytm — backed by China’s Alibaba — is making special efforts towards strengthening its team.

“We’re expanding at a very quick rate, and we’ve been looking across the industry for lateral hires,” said Amit Sinha, vice-president of business and people at Paytm. “For our mainline business and frontfacing roles, we’ve set our sights on business analysts across consulting firms, who can open up new ways of thinking at Paytm, and be able to lead multiple projects.”

Different roles across customer onboarding, logistics, products, fraud prevention, business development, category management, and payment operations have been filled by hires from top consulting firms around the country.

In February this year, Sachin Kumar from McKinsey joined the ecommerce platform as general manager of customer onboarding. Mayank Tewari and Sumit Somani, also from McKinsey, joined in April as deputy general manager of logistics and senior manager of products and fraud prevention, respectively. McKinsey’s Kshitij Sanghi was the most recent to join, taking on the role of vice-president of digital goods in June.

Narendra Singh Yadav left his job at BCG to join Paytm in March as deputy general manager of business development and category management.

From AT Kearney, three have joined Paytm. Shashank Bajaj joined in January this year, and heads customer lifecycle management as general manager. Anshul Singhal took on the role of deputy general manager of fulfillment operations in May. Varun Gupta also joined in May as general manager of payment operations.

The company is still looking at hiring another 20-25 people from across the consulting industry, averaging at least five to six lateral recruits a month. Paytm is also looking to poach key talent from PwC, EY, as well as Bain & Company.

Nehul Malhotra, from McKinsey, also joined Paytm in December last year as deputy general manager of merchant management, as reported by ET.

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