Unacademy halves Relevel team to 700 amid global job market slowdown

SoftBank-backed Unacademy's job guarantee program vertical, Relevel, on which the edtech unicorn has been extremely bullish lately, has halved its team to 700 employees over the last two to three months amid a global slowdown in the job market.

The company has exercised layoffs and has internally migrated redundant employees of Relevel to other Unacademy group companies, at least three sources aware of the matter said.

The layoffs and relocation of Relevel employees happened just before Unacademy's chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, Gaurav Munjal, in an internal note to employees, said that the company will not exercise any layoffs and would rather relocate redundant employees to other teams.

The company has laid off employees across the sales, operations, and placements teams, and no one from the product team was affected, sources said, requesting anonymity. Internal relocation of employees, too, happened across these teams, sources added.

The move came as placements through Relevel, a tech upskilling platform, have slowed down with technology companies across the globe, freezing hiring amid recessionary fears.

"Relevel has halved 50 percent of its workforce over the last two to three months. The team size is down to 700 from 1,500," said one of the people quoted above.

"Placement rates are consistently dropping over the last few months and so there's a huge sense of fear internally within the team," the person added.

Another person aware of the matter said that rather than a slowdown in the overall job market, Relevel was struggling with external placement tie-ups. Therefore, the company has been raising its internal assessment standards so that fewer candidates pass its placement test and become eligible for jobs.

Interestingly, the slowdown in the job market doesn't seem to have affected other recruitment platforms like Naukri. The company, run by Info Edge, said its recruitment business recorded 49 percent growth in new customers and billing growth was witnessed across IT and non-IT.

Unacademy has already laid off more than 750 employees, or about 13 percent of its workforce, since the start of this year, as the SoftBank-backed company has been aggressively focussing on achieving profitability.

Moreover, funding directed towards India's startup ecosystem has slowed down this year, with investors cautiously investing in high-growth loss-making technology companies. Consumer edtech companies have bore the brunt of the funding slowdown as they have also seen demand for online education offerings slowing with schools and physical tuition centers opening.

Munjal had also announced a number of cost-cutting measures including pay cuts for founders, in a bid to focus on profitability, in another internal note to employees in July. Munjal had said that Unacademy would stop free meals at its offices and would curtail certain freebies given to its top management. He had said that the company should start embracing 'frugality.'

In another cost-cutting initiative, Unacademy had suspended contracts of some of its doubt-solving NEET and IIT-JEE educators, Unacademy had told educators that it has made 'strategic changes' to its customised learning solutions and owing to the change it will 'significantly' reduce doubt solving on its platform.

However, Unacademy has been going aggressive with its offline plans. The company opened an offline tuition center in Kota, earlier this year, and had spent nearly Rs 100 crore on hiring 30 educators from the town.