BharatPe laid off several employees after announcing salary hikes in April

• The company has laid off 40 people and while it maintains that it did because they were “underperformers” and is still hiring.
• Sources told Business Insider that the employees were not warned of any ‘underperformance’ earlier.
• Due to the coronavirus pandemic, startups across the country have been reducing their headcount to cut costs.

Digital payments platform BharatPe has laid off several employees, sources told Business Insider. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, startups like Ola, OYO, Zomato, Swiggy – have all been reducing their headcount to cut costs.

The company has laid off 40 people and while it maintains that it did because they were “underperformers” and is still hiring but the employees disagree.

“BharatPe is one of the only companies still aggressively hiring. We did our appraisals as per schedule in April and rewarded the good performers and also let go of a few underperformers . We have in fact hired our CBO Nishant Jain and CPO Ankur Jain and are still hiring more across levels. BharatPe takes pride in having the highest business / employee in the FinTech space in India,” said Ashneer Grover, Co Founder and CEO, BharatPe.

However, an employee who was laid off said that the company had not mentioned any underperformance earlier and asked the employee to put down papers in early April. The employee continued to say that the company refused to pay the salaries for March and few days of April, and was insistent that the employee handover the laptop first. “It happened during the lockdown period, so obviously I couldn't go to handover the laptop,” said the employee.

The source also said that BharatPe asked them to sign a declaration form regarding the resignation. According to the sources, the company has also ended the contract with the third-party agency which was responsible for on field executives and several other services. However, the company did not confirm this to Business Insider.

Another employee told Business Insider that the company forced them to resign by saying that they won't be given an experience letter otherwise.

BharatPe had earlier told Business Insider that it was offering salary hikes and kept its promises of appraisals to employees. However, the employee told Business Insider that only a select few in the company got the hikes.

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