How eCommerce will retain the talent it is importing from Silicon Valley?

With a mounting number of consumer Internet companies in India, the latest hold-up, which is keeping the firms on their toes, is attrition. The top-most Internet firms are in a scuffle with the management executives who were recently hired from the Silicon Valley.

Top eCommerce firms, including Flipkart, Zomato and Ola, recently made headlines for their hiring spree and splurging millions of dollars on their executives, are now troubled due to heavy migration of skilled professionals.

Sunit Mehra, managing partner at Hunt Partners India, which is an executive recruitment company, says, Consumer Internet companies in India "are growing so rapidly that they haven't built the fundamental concept of retaining people, especially at the top-level."

Flipkart, one of India’s largest eCommerce firms, recently lost Srivals Kumar after he resigned as general counsel and legal head due to organisational restructuring. The firm, then, immediately hired Rajinder Sharma, former director and general counsel – South and West Asia, at Samsung.

Not just this, but around four other senior executives have quit Flipkart this year including Mekin Maheshwari (chief people officer), Ravi Vora (chief executive of strategic brands group), Amod Malviya (chief technology officer) and Sameer Nigam (engineering head).

Flipkart, the firm which is valued at $15 billion, however, have been hiring a number of skilled professionals like it recently hires former Google executive Punit Soni as chief product officer, as reported by The Economic Times.

In a similar episode, Zomato’s Durga Raghunath too left the firm as senior vice-president after after a six-month stint to find an online publishing company. Hence, he also joined a list of senior executives who have quit the venture this year.

The former chief product officer Namita Gupta and former chief marketing officer Ramneet Arora also quit the firm in less than a year’s time.

Prateek Srivastava, founder and CEO of talent acquisition firm Basil Advisors, says, "A lot of the hiring (at Indian internet companies) is pushed by the investors, and while the companies have hired top-notch people from the Valley, the culture here is very different."

Arvind Singhal, the former CEO of Ola’s TaxiForSure unit, also joined the listings along with Swaminathan Seetharaman, who resigned as vice-president for engineering.

"(The resignations have) less to do with compensation. You can attract the best talent with money, but you're not going to always retain them with money," Srivastava added.