Flipkart fiasco: ‘Won’t honour jobs promises before December’

IIM-Ahmedabad and Flipkart were locked in a face-off on Thursday with the e-commerce major refusing to honour its job commitment to students of the prestigious institute until December, as against June promised earlier, but offered a compensation for the intervening period.

While the Bengaluru-based company cited restructuring of its businesses as the reason behind deferring the joining dates for campus recruits, IIM-A said its students have already been getting job offers from other companies and they are looking at these opportunities. 

IIM-A Placement Committee Chairman Asha Kaul said the company is firm on its earlier stand that students can only join in December rather than June and for that new hires will be paid a compensation of Rs 1.5 lakh each. Efforts by the institute to convince the company to allow students to join their jobs on the date promised earlier failed as the Flipkart today said during a conference call that it can’t adhere to IIM-A demand. 

The company maintained that it is going through an organisational restructuring and looking to creating right kind of job for the students. “They categorically said they don’t want to budge on that. 

Its now for the students to decide what they want to do, but we have already been getting offers from other companies that say that they will like to create jobs for these students,” Kaul said, adding students are now open to “looking for engagement with other companies”. 

During the campus placement season that concluded in February this year, Flipklart had hired 18 students from IIM-A and it had asked them to join in June as per the offer letter. On Friday last week, Flipkart wrote to students saying they can only join from December and not June as promised earlier, and for that each will get compensation.