Grofers, the hyperlocal grocery delivery startup is now stuck in a legal tangle after it revoked the job offers of 67 students. A legal notice has been sent by 20 students collectively to Grofers.
“The last date to reply to the legal notice sent to Grofers is this Friday. However, they have not taken any step and have not replied to the notice yet. Also, there has been no response to students calls and emails. Plus, Grofers has also turned its face from giving the earlier compensation offered to the students. The students are now in a fix and have no option other than to adopt the legal route,” told, Myadvo, a legal tech firm which is facilitating this case by connecting students with domain expert lawyer.
Earlier this year, Grofers had revoked offer letters of over 67 students from colleges all over India – DTU, NIT Allahabad, PEC Chandigarh etc. As claimed, the students had already come to Gurgaon after receiving confirmation on June 27 in order to begin their professional life. However, on June 30th, their offers were revoked, “Owing to market conditions and changes which affect their business”, as told by HR head of Grofers to students.
Though Grofers had promised to share their resume with the headhunters & consultants they regularly work with. It also promised to circulate students’ resumes amongst the senior team and reach out to the alumni networks of their senior team members for searching job opportunities for the students. But, as per the students, this isn’t enough and dicey, as Grofers is actually not taking any concrete measures to handle the situation.
“Getting a lawyer from the traditional route was not helpful at all for some of them as the lawyers were not able to provide a clear timeline and there was also no one who could be held accountable,” said Myadvo in a statement.
This is the first time that students have to get into a legal action against a company. Earlier Flipkart also deferred job offers for 15 IIM-A students, for which it was threatened to get blacklisted from recruiting in all the IIM campuses. Adding to this, recently, Flipkart was also into news for plans to let go over 700-1000 underperforming employees. Recently, startups like Snapdeal, Helpchat, Peppertap, LocalOye, Tinyowl (before getting acquired by Roadrunnr) also laid off a large number of employees.
In maximum institutions, students who have the job offer from one company, are not allowed to appear in interviews for other companies. Revoking or deferring the job offers can thus play a havoc to the professional life of many and that too when someone is just beginning the career. With such incidences, there has been seen steep fall in student applying to work for startups.
Also, many institutions have introduced strict guidelines to follow for startups before coming for campus recruitments.
All in all, this is not a good news for the startup ecosystem. For any startup, a good team plays a crucial role in the success and with such a foundation laid by the existing leaders, the road will become difficult for the upcoming startups to hire and attract talent to their companies.
We have written to Grofers for more details on this, their reply is awaited.
