PayPal opens new vistas for women post career-break

Outside San Jose, the MNC’s second largest tech centre is in Chennai and it also has a spruced-up tech centre in Bengaluru. Riding on a robust hiring framework, the company has plans to increase the headcount by 600 by next year. The single-digit attrition has not raised any “red flags” with innovative HR strategies helping the company bring it down each year, Jayanthi Vaidyanathan, Senior Director, PayPal told DTNext.

‘Recharge,’ a six-week HR programme, is one such aimed at providing opportunity to women, she said, talking about talent-related initiatives of the company. “It is an untapped opportunity in cities that have a skewed gender distribution of talent. We have also tied up with vendor partners, apart from using creative strategies to source talent. Through Recharge, we are looking at hiring women techies with an average experience of seven to eight years. These resources, after opting out of the workforce for many reasons, are keen to join the mainstream,” Vaidyanathan said, adding this talent pool is what the company is pursuing as the country has a vast reserve of senior Individual Contributors (ICs), who can be deployed in key functional roles such as product architecture, product management, operations and analytics.

PayPal has recruited 23 people through this programme. “In the last two years, our Recharge programme has received over 1,500 applications that we have hired from, reflecting the potential of this work group. We organise boot camps and conduct a day-long seeding module, followed by mentoring, panel discussions, one-on-one meetings, workshops and ice-breaking sessions. Such an approach instills confidence among the techies who are raring to get back to work after their break,” she said. The Recharge programmes in Chennai and Bengaluru (later this year) will have a session on artificial intelligence too.

She also highlighted PayPal’s hiring and recruitment strategy for India. “We hired 600 techies last year. Our current headcount is 1,700-plus (doubled since 2016), showing how consistently we have invested in the market as PayPal India is viewed as a key growth market,” Vaidyanathan said. Some of the roles PayPal intends to hire include – application developers – Java, Node JS, back-end developers and data engineers.