Boom in job market on the back of economic recovery and vaccination drive

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The picture is looking bright on the job front ahead of Diwali. Employment opportunities are at a new high and the demand for talent, particularly in tech space, is at multi-year high level, The Economic Times has reported. The newspaper, quoting Randstad India, ABC Consultants, Antal India, CIEL HR, TeamLease Services, said mandates compared to pre-Covid levels, are up by 15-25%. At top-level, it has more than doubled.

Hiring frenzy

“This frenzy is something we haven’t seen in the last two decades,” Sanjay Shetty, director – professional search & selection and strategic accounts at Randstad India, is quoted saying in the report

Tech and tech-related sectors are reporting high demand for talent as the pandemic has pushed even traditional industries towards digitisation.

Financial services and fintech, retail, logistics and e-commerce, healthcare and pharma, consumer and manufacturing are the other sectors scouting for talent.

Sashi Kumar, head of sales at Indeed India, is quoted as saying that the number of job postings on Indeed on October 22 were a record 18% above the pre-pandemic baseline (February 2020). Job growth is accelerating in the wake of vaccination drives and fading Covid-19.

Shiv Agrawal, managing director of ABC Consultants, said the ‘Great Resignation’ and high attrition is leading to a rise in replacement hiring and there is pent-up demand from companies after the pandemic.

“There are new investments, companies have had healthy profits, there’s an appetite to hire,” he is quoted as saying.

After the restricting during the Covid-19 pandemic, companies now the floodgates have opened, he added.

Spike in mid-level hiring

According to Joseph Devasia, managing director at recruitment firm Antal India, the highest spike is in the mid-level hiring, followed by leadership hiring. The surge now is similar to the surge we saw post Great Recession in 2008, he added.

Mid-level hiring is also seeing the sharpest surge at TeamLease Services, where overall hiring activity recorded a YoY growth of 89% in August. It also surpassed the pre-pandemic levels of August 2019 by 24%. “The surge in hiring activities in the October-December quarter compared to the year-ago period is being led by the engineering and manufacturing as well as the technology sectors,” said TeamLease cofounder Rituparna Chakraborty.

CIEL HR Services has seen a 50% jump. The company CEO Aditya Narayan Mishra attributed this to “investments flowing into the startup ecosystem and technology-led companies.