India’s Hiring Sentiment Picks Up for April-September

BENGALURU: The country’s recruiting sentiment has improved a little after the lockdown with an increased hiring intent for the first half of this fiscal, according to a report by staffing firm TeamLease, which covered over 800 firms across 21 sectors.
Hiring intent, which is the percentage of employers that is likely to recruit employees during this period, has now jumped to 18% for the period up to September 2020, compared to 11% during the lockdown (March 25-June 7).
The data also showed that India is faring much better on the intent to hire compared to major geographies like Americas (8%), Europe (9%) and the Middle East (11%).

This is still much lower than pre-Covid levels but the relative growth is being seen as a sign of gradual recovery. For example, the same metric was at 96% during October 2019 to March 2020. During previous reviews, intent to hire was defined as the percentage of employers that are going to continue to hire at least the same number of staff as they did during the half-year period of previous financial years.
According to the current estimates, without any major disruption like localised lockdown in major metros, this is expected to increase for the rest of the financial year ending March 31 2021, TeamLease co-founder and EVP Rituparna Chakraborty told TOI.
While signs of optimism are visible across industries, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, education services, e-commerce and tech startups, agriculture and agro-chemicals, IT along with FMCG players are the top sectors with hiring bullishness. These sectors plan to hire across the ranks — from senior positions to entry-level and gig-economy jobs like delivery executives, for which demand remains higher than supply, especially in cities like Bengaluru.
For example, e-tail major Amazon India has plans to hire 70,000 gradually for delivery, supply chain and customer support services. IT major TCS said last week it plans to hire 40,000 freshers in India and in May, HCL Technologies announced plans to hire 15,000. Then, education startups like Unacademy, which is backed by Facebook, is planning to hire a total of 450 people this year, its co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said.
In terms of cities, Bengaluru (21%) and Delhi (19%) remain the top two cities with increased hiring intent to be followed by Hyderabad (15%), Chandigarh (14%) and Mumbai (12%). The hiring intent during the lockdown in these cities was at 13%, 12%, 9%, 9% and 8%, respectively.
“These are green shoots at this point. What’s interesting is sectors that are doing well, like e-commerce, healthcare, FMCG essentials, in spite of Covid-19, the most optimistic firms there are being cautiously positive on hiring intent,” said Chakraborty. “The next half of the year, we anticipate, there will be more traction in the latter part of the year. There will be a gradual increase in sentiments (to hire),” Chakraborty added.

Source : ToI