How is Cashfree Strategising Upon Its Continuous Hiring Process?
With a workforce of over 225 employees in 2020, alongside digitally onboarding over 130 new hires, Cashfree is all set to raise the bar continue to expand its workforce as online payments become more entrenched. Aiming to cross headcount of 300 by March 2021 and of 400 by December 2021, Cashfree plans on staying on schedule with appraisals, bonuses and promotions for the current team.
Further, Cashfree is hiring across the board for roles such as Brand Marketing Manager, Growth Sales Lead, DevOps Engineers, Product Designers and Senior Software Architect to name a few.
And Currently, Cashfree is scaling up its business volumes to handle around five million transactions a day over the next seven to nine months as more enterprises across the country move towards digital solutions.
Sapna Sukumar, Head of Human Resources, Cashfree interacts with BW journalists, where she has tried to throw some light on Cashfree’s hiring strategy. Let's how different has been their scaling process from others in the same kitty.
1. What are your hiring plans for this year?
Cashfree is a tech company at heart and we continue to focus on innovation in digital payments. In 2020, we strengthened our workforce to over 225 employees with our hiring further accelerated due to the rise in e-commerce and digital payments sectors.
By the end of 2021, we plan to further double our workforce to 400+ team members, filling up critical positions to gear up for the next wave of transformation. As we build agile digital payments products, we are also building our sales and support teams to scale up our growth.
The hiring, as well as the orientation process of all new hires, has been executed digitally and across diverse verticals including product management, growth and marketing.
We have taken measures to ensure that our employees would not have to face any financial difficulties and job uncertainty. Against the backdrop of pink slips and pay cuts by other industries affected by this pandemic, Cashfree has maintained a focus on accelerating hiring along with planned appraisals and performance bonuses to help our employees stay motivated.
2. What kind of roles/profiles will you be hiring for?
Cashfree is hiring engineering managers for our payments teams who would be responsible for leading a team of high paced & smart engineers. Additionally, we are diversifying and hiring across verticals for roles marketing, growth, engineering, product design and software architecture.
3. What is driving this growth in headcount for you?
Currently, Cashfree processes transactions worth USD $2 billion monthly. We have been profitable for the last three financial years while growing revenue by around 30x over the past two years and close to 100x over the past three years.
In 2021, we plan to scale Cashfree’s payments solutions and develop innovative products, to process five million transactions a day over the next seven to nine months. Fintech and digital payments have great potential to be the backbone of the Indian economy. As businesses go increasingly digital-first, we have the opportunity to focus on strengthening the payments infrastructure to seamlessly support the unprecedented higher volumes of digital payments.
5. Will there be any changes to how you source/onboard talent post-Covid-19, as opposed to earlier?
In 2020, there were many companies who were negatively affected by the pandemic which led to a certain amount of retrenchment and so we hired the best talent from these companies that had layoffs. There were also several freshers at B-schools who saw their offers being withdrawn due to the pandemic situation and we were happy to recruit them. In the last year, we also actively engaged in acqui-hiring as a way of filling critical roles at Cashfree.
We are open to working with talented individuals who need to work remotely as we have always worked on a hybrid model. For the last one year, we have onboarded new employees virtually.
6. Where will you be sourcing the talent from?
We tap talent who are actively looking for job changes across various career platforms. We also look at passive talent to engage them in future roles. Additionally, we have instituted IJPs (internal job postings) and consider employee referrals as well as freshers from b-schools.
7. How do you plan to diversify and nurture more female talent at Cashfree?
Cashfree is a performance-driven technology company with a healthy ratio of male and female employees. We pride ourselves in being an equal opportunity employer and offer several benefits to all our employees including flexible work timings, work from home, uber credits for travel, great budgets for learning, exciting rewards & recognitions and more.
8. What are some of the activities that Cashfree is undertaking to boost employee morale?
Cashfree has been continuing merit-based appraisals and has offered performance bonuses to help the current team stay motivated and productive during these unprecedented times.
We believe that upskilling and reskilling are critical in building and maintaining a high-performing organisation which is why we launched "Learning@Cashfree". This initiative is designed to support Cashfree employees in their professional development and in advancing their careers by encouraging voluntary or manager-initiated academic/professional learning programs. For desirable programs, education assistance is set on a co-pay model where Cashfree and the employee bear the equal cost of the program. For essential courses like Professional Certification Programs that are relevant to the area of the work, Cashfree reimburses up to 100% of the cost. While the industry benchmark for Learning and Development is 2% of the overall budget, we dedicate 5%.
Beyond these approaches, we have various fun committees at Cashfree who have organised treks, bike rides, quiz competitions and board games while following all safety and social distancing guidelines. We have also set up music, dance, arts & crafts, fitness and book clubs to encourage a diverse and fun work culture. We are also looking to move into a new office space which would be eight times larger than our current workplace and more engaging for our employees.
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