Hiring across cities in India showed a decline in March, a report by Naukri JobSpeak Index showed on Monday. The report says that there was a decline of 18 per cent in hiring activity as compared to March 2019.
Interestingly, this decline in hiring activity is not only attributed to the COVID-19 crisis, but also the early signs of slowdown starting in January, the report observes. In January, the index grew by only 5.75 per cent followed by no growth in February, depicting an already prevailing slowdown.
The report pointed out that the travel and airlines, hospitality and retail segment nosedived by more than 50 per cent in hiring activity in March as compared to March 2019. The restaurant and travel segment registered a decline of 56 per cent followed by retail at 50 per cent and automotive at 38 per cent.
The report said that in Delhi and the NCR region, the hiring activity witnessed a negative growth of 26 per cent. The hospitality and pharma industries saw a dip in hiring by 66 per cent and 43 per cent respectively in Delhi. The report points out that recruitment activities across all experience levels saw a negative growth in the Delhi/NCR region.
Similarly, Chennai also witnessed a drop of 24 per cent in hiring activity in March. The report highlighted that the hospitality, IT/software and banking industries saw a decline of 63, 27 and 21 per cent respectively. However the IT-Hardware sector saw a growth of 14 per cent across job roles in Chennai.
On the other hand, in Bengaluru, though there was a decline in hiring across sectors, the BPO and the ITeS sectors saw a growth of 6 per cent in demand for professionals in Bengaluru.
In the financial capital of Mumbai, there was an overall dip in recruitment by around 14 per cent in March. Hiring in the hospitality and the accounting sector saw a dip of 60 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. In the city of Pune too, there was a dip in recruitment activity by around 12 per cent. However, hiring in Pune in the BPO/ ITeS and the pharma sectors saw a growth of 21 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.
“The pandemic crisis has impacted (year-on-year) growth in hiring activities leading to the 18 per cent decline. The negative sentiment on hiring was visible starting January 2020 itself mirroring the economic trends. The hiring activity for the first 20 days of March had seen only a 5 per cent decline. However, due to the nationwide lockdown, there was a substantial drop in recruitment activity in the last 10 days of March, resulting in an overall drop of 18 per cent in hiring. Industries such as hotel, travel, aviation and retail have declined the most during the month,” said Pawan Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Naukri.com.
The Naukri JobSpeak is a monthly index that calculates and records hiring activity based across industries and cities on the job listings on the portal Naukri.com website every month. The index includes jobs that might be for replacement hiring. December 2008 is taken to be the base with an index value of 1,000 and the subsequent monthly index is compared with the data for December 2008. The jobs analysed for the monthly index are qualified on the basis of white collar, urban, belonging to the organised corporate sector jobs with a major focus on service industries.
Commenting on the future trends in hiring in India, HR experts such as Aditya Narayan Mishra, director and CEO of CIEL HR Services, felt that the April-June quarter hiring will see the major impact of COVID-19. He says that hiring in the IT industry will decline by nearly 10 per cent whereas engineering, manufacturing, construction, retail, consumer durables, white goods and services will see a steep decline in hiring by around 30-40 per cent.
“The impact on the FMCG, healthcare and pharma segments will see a minimum of 5 per cent reduction in new hiring as they are being cautious about expenses and are extremely caught up in running their operations amidst the lockdown and concerns about people's health,” said Mishra.
