Working for a startup? Your job is in danger

India’s online market place Snapdeal laid-off 600 employees recently and warned the co-founders employees for more tough decisions. Well, Snapdeal is not along in firing its employees as more Indian startups are handing out pink slips to hundreds.

The fear of being fired is looming large on employees as many startups have begun giving notices to workers to trim costs, save money and make profits.

Apart from Snapdeal, other Indian startups such as Craftsvilla, YepMe, Tolexo, etc have laid-off employees recently.

"(Craftsvilla) has laid off more than 100 staffers in recent weeks, including its entire product and technology teams and most of its operations and marketing teams,” a former senior executive of the company told ET.

In fact, some senior employees aware of the coming troubles had put in their papers a couple of months ago, sources told ET.

Industry experts say the lay-offs could be due to slowing funding, rash decisions by founders, etc.

"More (layoffs) will happen throughout 2017. The cleanup has started and most consumer internet companies will go through this,” Harminder Sahni, managing director at consultancy Wazir Advisors, told ET.

"While we were preparing for the worst, we still had a little hope. But when it was clear the company was shutting, the main priority was to relocate the employees,” Ipe Walliaveetil, who was senior manager for operations at Stayzilla, told ET.

Fashion retailer YepMe recently laid off an unspecified number of people from its warehousing and quality control teams.

"We were planning to break-even in January. But demonetisation hit, (the option for cash payments on delivery) disappeared and sales were down. We decided to move our focus outside of India,” Vivek Gaur, founder of YepMe, which recently began operations in the United Kingdom, told ET.