Terrible Leadership and Strategy - "Why would one acquire a company without knowing how to run it!" - Anonymous employee Naspers Employee Review

1.0
22 Oct 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I worked for "Aasaanjobs" - Company which was acquired by Naspers through OLX. Here's what went right in that acquisition for us employees: 1. You get stable pay, receive salary on time. 2. You are part of bigger group. So, you get the advantage of their employee skills development programme, employee health and safety policies, etc.

Cons

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.

Explore other reviews about Naspers

4.0
3 Oct 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Global company with multiple ways of making money. Smart manage who really understand their business

Cons

many business with different priorities sometimes makes it difficult for people who are not in the central office to make a difference. I suppose this is similar to many other large companies, but in this case there is sometimes a disconnect

1
3.0
24 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice office and environment, learned a lot

Cons

Very low pay, no room for growth

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