Yahoo! to hire nearly 150 people in India

Yahoo! is hiring for hundreds of job openings including nearly 150 vacancies in India, even as the internet major is set to bring down its global workforce by about 675 employees.

"We are currently hiring for key positions and will continue to invest in strategically important areas," a Yahoo! spokesperson based in the US told media in an e-mail.

While the spokesperson did not elaborate on country-specific hiring plans, the career section of the internet major's website shows that Yahoo! is looking for about 150 positions in India alone.

The openings are for its operations in Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi, while most of them are for Bangalore. Further, the internet major has over 120 job vacancies for different offices in the US, the website shows.

The India openings are for various departments including engineering, customer care, research and product management, among others. Last week, while announcing its first quarter results on April 21, Yahoo! said that it would slash five per cent of its headcount worldwide.

At present, the company has 13,500 employees globally and a five per cent reduction would amount to laying off 675 people. The firm is resorting to job cuts in the wake of slackening advertisement revenues and a 78 per cent drop in first quarter profit at USD 118 million.

However, it is not clear whether India operations would be affected by the job cuts. India has about 1,500 employees. "We will be reducing the number of our current employees worldwide by approximately five per cent. We do not break out how individual countries and teams will be impacted.

"We currently have 13,500 employees worldwide. We do not break down how many employees are in each country," the Yahoo! spokesperson said.

The spokesperson noted that the majority of impacted employees are expected to be notified within the next two weeks. In 2008, Yahoo!'s worldwide workforce was about 15,000 and out of them, about 1,500 employees were in India.

Yahoo! last October had announced that it would reduce its headcount by as much as 10 per cent. "The goal is to reduce its current annualised cost run rate of approximately 3.9 billion dollars by more than 400 million dollars before the end of 2008," the Internet major had said in October.

"The majority of expenses are headcount-related, Yahoo! expects to reduce its global workforce by at least 10 per cent during the fourth quarter of 2008," it had noted.