Naspers Reviews

I worked for "Aasaanjobs" - Company which was acquired by Naspers through OLX. Here's what went wrong in that acquisition for us employees: 1. Everything after the acquisition was painted merry, but soon the meritocratic culture of Aasaanjobs started to collapse. Naspers changed the entire upper management in the company, took the hold of company from its founders and the circus started. This new OLX management has a very little of the idea about how to run (or keep running) an innovative company in India. The strategy and planning is plagued with Broken Communication, lack of transparency, sub-par problem solving and egotist management. This resulted into distracted strategy plannings. Management dismissed ideas and metrics presented by employees (who were actually working on ground level in recruitment and had better idea about the space). And then failed to provide focused roadmap themselves! And when numbers started falling, employees were to blame. 2. Naspers (and OLX) boasted about being employee first, but in reality very less efforts were taken to reward employee efforts. Poor Human Resource management, mis-managed appraisals, complete ignorance to employee insights burned down the joyful Aasaanjobs work culture. Every feedback to HR turned out to be illogical and unnecessary battle. Who would want to work in company where HR thinks that company is doing favour on employees by paying them and keeping them employed. 3. Apart from above issues, I want to highlight a particular project of "Converting Aasaanjobs to OLX jobs". Till now this project has been taken up and completed and dismantled by management, TWICE in a span of just 1.5 year! To put this in perspective, this project employed almost 60 odd engineers working tirelessly for 4-5 months. And everything went in vein and teams had to make last minute adjustments to revert back the changes. Every time management pushed for this project aggressively and in the end said, "Sorry we did not think the project through" Apart from waste of time and resources of company, this seems like a stupid game that management is playing with employees' careers. So for past 2 years, 80 odd top class engineers and product managers have done very little to add to their resume just because of management was clueless.

Knowledge sharing/management is horrible. Unless you are in the upper parts of the company it's difficult to know what all the legs are doing. MIH, SWAT, 24.com and Media24 do have a relationship, but it's very seldom that you'll find them working together. While Koos is brilliant, I have doubts over some of the other media execs, especially the folk at Media24 print/publishing. Their minds are still a bit old school and struggle to keep up with the current trends.