Festival hiring yet to pick up

No clear indications of temp jobs from sectors

Despite the festive season kicking off, hiring of temp staff to meet the seasonal demand in various sectors has not picked up. Even ecommerce, which has started its seasonal sales, is still cautious about hiring.

The temporary staff hiring for the festive season usually starts before August and goes on till December. However, by August the industry gets a clearer picture about the hiring trends.

As per the data from Indian Staffing Federation, in the second half of 2018, different sectors had hired around two lakh people for temp jobs. In 2019, despite the general gloom in the economy, hiring witnessed a 10 to 15 per cent growth over the previous year. However, this year ISF has not seen clear indications of hiring from across sectors yet.

“Usually, e-commerce, retail, consumer durables and BFSI are the major sectors which hire people to meet the festive season demand for additional hands,” said Lohit Bhatia, president, ISF.

This time, almost all the sectors are cautious about hiring more people as the existing staff is not fully engaged.

E-commerce, which has been the forerunner in terms of hiring in the past few years, has already started its festive season sales.

However, when Financial Chronicle asked about this year’s hiring, Amazon said, “currently, we do not have any information to share with regards to hiring ahead of the 2020 festive season.”

Last year, Amazon itself had created more than 90,000 seasonal employment opportunities across its fulfilment centres, sorting centres, delivery stations, partner fulfilment network and customer service sites.

This year, even during the lockdown in May, Amazon announced that it has opened close to 50,000 seasonal roles to meet the surge in demand for online products.

However, delivery services continued to be disrupted even after the lockdown.

“E-commerce may probably see a surge in sales due to the pent-up demand of the past few months. This would require more hands to deliver things to the customer. However, the social distancing norms will force them to limit the number of people who can be deployed at warehouses and other centres,’ said Bhatia.

“As far as other sectors are concerned, businesses are still evaluating and waiting to see how the festive season shapes up. For them, it is still early days,” he added.