MUMBAI | NEW DELHI: Ecommerce companies could roll out 500 jobs with salaries of more than Rs 1 crore each this year, according to estimates by five search firms including RGF Executive Search and Longhouse Consulting.Companies such as Flipkart Snapdeal , Ola, Uber, Quikr, CommonFloor, Yepme, OLX, Junglee, FashionAndYou, Hungama, BookMyShow, Jabong, Cleartrip and Lenskart are among companies offering jobs with one-crore-plus salaries, though the first three account for a big chunk of such offers, officials at several headhunting firms said.ABC Consultants has conducted more than 100 senior-level searches for ecommerce companies in the past six months, said Director Siddharth Raisurana.

Longhouse Consulting, the executive search division of CareerNet, is looking at a dozen plus mandates a month. “We have 70-80% of our business coming from ecommerce and expect to handle 180-200 mandates this year, up from 75-85 last year,” said Anshuman Das, managing partner, Longhouse Consulting.

“We are filling in at least one position a day at the leadership level,” said GC Jayaprakash, executive director at RGF Executive Search. Companies are willing to pay a premium to attract top talent that will lead to wealth creation and high valuation if they go ahead with an IPO, he added.Human resource heads of ecommerce companies couldn’t agree more. “Investors are bringing hundreds of millions of dollars. We can spend it either on infrastructure or people. And that’s what they are doing – investing in people,” said the human resource head of one of the leading online retailers, on conditions of anonymity.The HR head of another online retailer is currently scouting for such senior level talent for several of its revenue generating core functions. The crore-plus figure is the total cost to company (CTC); typically 30% of senior level compensation is linked to stocks and esops. “This year also we are looking at 30-40% increase in hiring across the board and a corresponding increase in leadership levels,” said Raj Raghavan, head-HR, Amazon India, declining to comment on salaries.Saurabh Nigam, VP, HR at Snapdeal said leadership hiring has gone up at his firm given the business growth. “We’re a 5,000 people strong team now, and need to beef up our leadership hiring,” he added.An email sent to Flipkart did not elicit a response. Estimates of five search firms, including ABC Consultants, RGF Executive Search and Longhouse Consulting, that were further vetted by HR heads of some of the top ecommerce companies on conditions of anonymity, suggest that the total number of senior level mandates will go up to about 1,000 in the ecommerce space from 250-300 last year. About half such jobs will pay Rs 1 crore and above.Ecommerce is also turning out to be one of the major revenue generators for search firms in the past 6-8 months. For RGF Executive Search, a part of $13-billion Japanese major Recruit Holdings, technology based ecommerce companies have become one of the highest revenue generators in the past 6-8 months and close to 25-30% of their revenue this calendar is expected to come from ecommerce, up from 10-15% a year ago. ABC Consultants says that ecommerce constitutes 15% of their business, up from 5% a year ago. Kelly Services India made ecommerce a separate vertical this year.“We expect ecommerce to constitute 10% of our total business in the next six months versus 5% now,” said Kamal Karanth, managing director, Kelly Services and Kelly OCG. “Senior-level hiring has definitely seen an uptick. We would have hired about 7 positions six months ago. In this quarter alone, we are looking at closing 7-8 positions. The business is growing and we need senior talent for roles like sales, products and technology,” said Anupama Beri, HR head, MagicBricks, who moved from Snapdeal in December where she was heading HR.“Salaries have definitely gone up with such intense competition within the ecommerce companies, salary percentage is broadly 25-30% higher from last year for senior roles,” said Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder & Chief Business Officer, ShopClues, who is looking for senior level talent for VP/AVP levels for their technology/product teams as well as for some positions at director level for their marketing and categories department.Ola is looking at hiring more than a dozen mid-to-senior executives for positions like director and senior manager in the coming quarter, says a source. The demand is mostly in technology and product management, and candidates are being sourced from firms like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, says Sinosh Panicker, associate principal, global technology services, Heidrick & Struggles.