Updated: Exclusive: Marriage Of Inconvenience: Quikr Fires More Than 150 CommonFloor Employees Post Acquisition

More than 150 employees of CommonFloor have been asked to leave the company by Quikr after the latter bought out the former, this January. Four people aware of the development said employees are getting termination notices from the human resources department.

Online classifieds firm Quikr had celebrated the new year putting an end to long drawn courtship and speculations by acquiring online realty player CommonFloor, for a reported $200 Mn in an all stock-deal. The valuation of CommonFloor itself was much debated. But that is another story.

The HR mails are on the lines that “there is no suitable role for your designation.” One of the people mentioned above says that the design team of 15 has been fired, along with 5-10 people from the engineering team, 5 in the product team and 20-30 from the service team. Many people have resigned on their own after the acquisition. One employee said that “the promises (made at the time of merger) were not kept.”

In the mail there was no mention of severance. The HR department of Quikr is still finalising the details on the severance package. 

According to a source, CommonFloor’s Bangalore office in Diamond District will be shut within a month’s time.

At the time of acquisition, the Bangalore team had a strength of 650 employees with a total employee count of around 1000 nationally.

Message sent to Sumit Jain, co-founder of CommonFloor remained unanswered at the time of publishing. Quikr didn’t confirm how many employees have been fired. In an emailed response, a Quikr spokesperson said,

“Bangalore will now serve as the main hub for all business functions of both Quikr and CommonFloor. As part of the overall integration exercise, we have been analysing all our assets and believe it is best to consolidate our physical as well as people assets based on our business needs. Together, we are highly committed to our consumers, people, partners and growing business in India.”

In a letter to CommonFloor employees, at the time of acquisition, Sumit had promised that “don’t worry about your job or role.” Clearly, this assurance has not been met.

Update (9:15 PM, 14th March)

After publishing this news, a couple of Commonfloor employees reached out to us and shared that an automated termination mail stating “to look out for career opportunities outside the company” was sent to them at 4:58 PM on Friday, so that there is no immediate backlash.

In another mail sent to the employees, it was stated that the founders of Quikr and CommonFloor will be there on Monday (today) to address employees. The founders will only meet the employees for 4-5 minutes and each employee have to take a token if they wanted to meet them.

What the CommonFloor employees had to go through, most of them who have family and kids, over the weekend was excruciating, to say the least.

[With inputs from Pooja Sareen]