Hiring activity saw 1% marginal growth in August: Report

Hiring activity witnessed a marginal growth of 1 per cent in August sequentially due to decline in job postings in sectors including engineering, logistic, agro-based industries among others, which has shown a slight improvement in the previous month, a report said on Monday.

Overall job postings witnessed a slight uptick in job posting activity in August, with a 1 per cent increase compared to the previous month, according to data from Monster Employment Index by Monster.com, a Quess Corp company.

The data further revealed that overall job postings have improved by 14 per cent year-on-year (August 2021 versus August 2020), indicating a strong recovery in the pipeline.

Despite the impact of the second wave of the pandemic, job demand recorded a sequential growth of 5 per cent in the last six months, it added.

As of August, online hiring demand witnessed a positive month-on-month growth in garments/ textiles/ leather, gems and jewellery (24 per cent), followed by production and manufacturing (8 per cent), oil/gas/petroleum/power (6 per cent), shipping/marine (4 per cent), and BPO/ITES (3 per cent) industries, according to the report.

The surge in job postings could be attributed to the imminent festive season and seasonal hiring demands across industries, the report noted.

The cabinet's approval of the PLI scheme for textiles is expected to further boost growth in the sector. Travel and tourism (2 per cent) which witnessed massive month-on-month (MoM) growth in July 2021, continues to show a positive outlook in August 2021.

However, industries such as engineering, cement, construction, iron/steel witnessed a MoM decline of 7 per cent in job postings in August followed by agro based industries (-6 per cent), FMCG, food and packaged food (-5 per cent) and logistic, courier/ freight/ transportation (-4 per cent), which had shown a slight improvement in the previous month.

The Monster Employment Index is a broad and comprehensive analysis of online job posting activity conducted by Monster India.

“With India recovering from the second wave of the pandemic, there has been positive stable growth in job postings in the month of August 2021. Moreover, with the imminent festive and seasonal demand, we expect hiring activity to flourish in the coming months, as we have already seen in the textile and manufacturing industries.

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“The hiring landscape across metropolitan cities has also been consistently on the rise since May 2021, across sectors,” Monster.com CEO Sekhar Garisa said.

Meanwhile, the report further revealed that in August, city wise trends have seen moderate MoM growth in job postings across Mumbai (3 per cent), Hyderabad (3 per cent), Chennai (3 per cent) and Coimbatore (2 per cent).

However, cities which fared reasonably well in July witnessed a monthly decline in job posting activity in August such as Kochi (-4 per cent), Kolkata (-4 per cent), Chandigarh (-1 per cent) and Jaipur (-1 per cent), it added.

In a MoM comparison, data from the Index also indicated that the marketing and communication (17 per cent) function witnessed the highest growth in job postings, largely observed in metro cities.

Customer service (2 per cent), software, hardware, telecom (2 per cent), and hospitality and travel (1 per cent) functions witnessed moderate growth, while healthcare (0 per cent) and finance and accounts (0 per cent) showed muted growth as of August compared with July, it added.