Business Standard

India Inc waits for festive booster for hiring

Recruitmen­ts still about 25% below pre-covid level

- SUDIPTO DEY

India Inc is still about 25 per cent below its precovid levels of hiring, despite aggressive campus recruitmen­t and the fight for technology talent, according to several talent search executives.

After the second Covid-19 wave during April-may 2021, a lot of hiring has been focused on specific skill segments, and has not been very broad based, experts point out. The thrust has been on the entry-level, junior, and mid-career job positions.

However, early trends indicate that within the next four weeks, a host of businesses across sectors are expected to roll out their hiring plans for the festive season, which typically kicks off in August and goes up to December.

The next four weeks will be crucial in deciding whether hiring will reach the precovid levels, says Lohit Bhatia, president, Indian Staffing Federation (ISF), whose 100odd members offer temporary or flexi worker solutions to businesses across sectors.

Human resources (HR) experts and search firms have been reporting a steady growth in hiring activity since end-june on a month-onmonth basis. Sanjay Shetty, director, profession­al search & selection, and strategic accounts, at Randstad India, a multinatio­nal HR consultanc­y firm, expects festival or seasonal hiring to jump by 30-35 per cent this year. That is on a Covid-hit lower base of the same period last year. This also comes with a caveat. “If the third-wave comes, all equations

go out of the window,” says Shetty.

The story so far

The IT (informatio­n technology) and ITES (Itenabled services) sectors have been at the forefront of India Inc’s hiring numbers. “Given the changed environmen­t owing to the pandemic, we have observed a sharp demand for technology-led transforma­tion from clients globally, and in India,” says Sandeep Kohli, partner and talent leader at EY India.

The profession­al services firm has been hiring from engineerin­g institutes, top management institutes as well as laterally, largely for emerging specialise­d areas and technologi­es such as artificial intelligen­ce, machine learning, cybersecur­ity, and analytics.

This has also been the case with most IT and ITES companies.

Job postings in the IT sector have surpassed the pre- Covid level by 4-5 per cent in the April-june quarter of 2021, despite the second wave, says Shetty.

More on business-standard.com “We expect these numbers to go up by 10-15 per cent in the July-september quarter,” he adds. Most HR experts expect the spurt in demand for tech profession­als to last for at least another 12 to 15 months, before getting normalised.

The second-largest demand stream of jobs is coming from sectors like e-commerce, logistics, delivery and supply chain, followed by pharmaceut­icals, lab testing technician­s and medical equipment profession­als.

The Indian Staffing Federation expects the August-december festival season to generate around 150,000 jobs in the e-commerce, delivery and logistics space. Grocery, food delivery, and hyper-local businesses are estimated to generate another 100,000 to 150,000 gig jobs in that period. Another source of jobs has been the freshly-funded tech start-ups, especially those in the edutech and fintech spaces.

As business volumes normalised with the advent of investment deals and a series of initial public offers (IPOS) in recent months, hiring by profession­al services firms and large and mid-sized law firms have mirrored pre-covid stages. “Client relationsh­ips and business developmen­t teams have gained more prominence, and firms are cautiously expanding in these teams. Partner moves have also seen an upswing in the last one year,” says Jaayaa A Kumar, a profession­al services strategy expert.

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