New Delhi: Patanjali Ayurveda has hired over 700 management trainees in the last three months and the company is looking to use them to double its FMCG retail outlets to 10,000 by June.
The new recruits are part of Patanjali’s Project ‘Vistaar’, which means ‘expansion’ in English, as the company looks to dominate the FMCG sector by 2020.
“We have hired 738 interns since December from second-rung business schools across the country with an aim to double our retail outlets in India,” said Avinash Kumar, head of project Vistaar at Patanjali. “Our target is to open 5,000 retail outlets in the next three months.”
The expansion is critical at this juncture as the company’s net profit has more than halved to Rs 529 crore.
“According to a provisional data sourced by CARE ratings, Patanjali’s net profits more than halved at Rs 529 crore in FY 18 from Rs 1,190 crore a year earlier,” The Economic Times reported.
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Trainees to help with expansion
Kumar told ThePrint that every trainee at Patanjali has been given a target to open 10 stores in the next three months. With every 11th store, their stipend will go up by 1.5 times.
While the company declined to share the details of the promised stipends, it is estimated to be around Rs 20,000-Rs 30,000 a month, depending on their location.
Kumar said the interns will be inducted after a one-day training programme where they will be provided with a marketing survey kit. After the induction, they will be sent to the field to find potential clients to open Patanjali outlets. The initial targets are local mom and pop store owners and FMCG distributors.
“After the completion of three months of contractual training, the company plans to hire 150 of the top performers to its total headcount of (on the payroll) one lakh employees,” said Kumar, who is also associate vice president (AVP), media and branding at Patanjali Ayurveda.
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FMCG major to stick to ‘second-rung’ colleges
In 2017, Patanjali Ayurved was approached by the country’s top business schools, including the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, IIM-Rohtak and IIM-Lucknow.
“The placement heads of these top colleges have requested us to visit the colleges for campus placements,” Acharya Bal Krishna, chief executive officer of the company, had told a publication about its plans to hire talent from leading B-schools.
But for now, Kumar said, the firm plans to stick to ‘second-rung’ colleges.
“We have hired students across the second and third grade MBA colleges in India,” Kumar said without mentioning the names of the colleges. “I don’t want to name the colleges as it will get us into a controversy over why we labelled them as second-rung colleges.
“There are two primary reasons,” he added. “Firstly, we are unsure if those students would wish to work on a much lesser salary package than the packages offered at multinational firms. Secondly, Patanjali has a work culture which is differently organised and it is oriented more towards the service of the nation.”