Covid-pushed business spike sends fintech ClearTax on hiring spree

At a time when most business giants are stuck in firing dilemmas, India's fintech bellwether player ClearTax is getting busier on its hiring spree.

At a time when most business giants are stuck in firing dilemmas, India’s fintech bellwether player ClearTax is getting busier on its hiring spree.

With the lockdown pushing up its tax/filing cloud business by as much as 30% every month, ClearTax has gone short of design experts at its research and development pool in Bengaluru.

“We are preparing to hire 25% more people in our 150 people-strong engineering and design division immediately, as business has been pacing up during the Covid days. And since our tax-filing product is cloud-based, our priority would be for the right candidate with engineering and design skillsets, irrespective of the city they are working from,” says Archit Gupta, founder and CEO, ClearTax.

Gupta is aware that hiring during the lockdown wouldn’t be easy. “Interviews will have to be over video-conferencing. Offer rollouts and employee onboarding will have to be remotely managed and laptops couriered,” he said, “but then we operate on cloud anyway and our staff have been working from homes.

The sudden surge in business happened because even the tax-filing deadlines extended over lockdown has been fast approaching. While in 2019, about 300-500 chartered accountant firms per month had been signing up with ClearTax’s TaxCloud, in 2020, post-lockdown, the monthly average number of new clients has grown to 1,500. ClearTax is the market leader in India’s fintech segment of filing tax and GST.”

Gupta observed that, given the lockdown situation, the Union government might take its GST2.0 reforms forward.

“In that case, we are technologically prepared to go with it, plying the 4G and Jio infra supports. Without anticipating Covid or lockdown, we had been investing in data scientists and mobile application experts to build our capacities,” he said.

Since the time of its inception in 2011, the start-up has seen equity investment to the tune of $65 million, with investors ranging from Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, Scott Banister, Composite Capital, Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.