Recruiters turn to upskilling platforms to hire talent

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, thus changing business priorities, needs and recruitment strategies of companies. A number of people have been gravitating towards upskilling platforms as Covid-19 has necessitated that job seekers and existing professionals are well equipped with new-age skills.

As per a LinkedIn Learning Data, in India, there has been an increase of 245% in the number of hours spent on virtual learning from July 2019 to June 2020, compared to a year earlier.

Many of the upskilling platforms offer placement assistance, helping their alumni connect with their hiring partner companies. While Covid-19 had disrupted hiring on these platforms in the first few months, it has now started picking up, and with more and more people taking up skilling courses to secure a job or to move to a better job, the companies have also started acquiring ‘upskilled-talent’ from these platforms.

SMEs and start-ups have restarted hiring and are finding talent quite aggressively over the last three months, according to Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder, InterviewBit & Scaler Academy.

Scaler Academy by InterviewBit, an ed-tech start-up for upskilling software engineers has over 600 partner companies, including the larger MNCs and fast-growing startups, Amazon, Flipkart, Uber, Cure.Fit, Zeta, Ola, OLX, MPL among others.

“In the initial few months of the pandemic and lockdown, we noticed that companies were being a little prudent with their investments across all domains, including recruitment. Therefore, hiring was being done only for critical roles. But that mood has changed considerably in this quarter. The monthly hire through Scaler has shot up by 100% in the last two months (July & August) as compared to earlier (May & June),” says Saxena.

“So far, we have had nine batches with 2,000+ students part of the programme. Out of this, students from five batches (roughly 1,000+) have completed their course and have been able to secure meaningful employment opportunities through our assistance. Currently, four batches are in progress.”

Saxena adds that the average compensation of Scaler alumni is approximately Rs 17-18 lakh. “Four of our students have been hired by Google and over 80+ people with Amazon.”

Ed-tech company Great Learning, with over 400 hiring partners including companies like ZS, American Express, Shell, Nielsen, Tech Mahindra, L&T and Tiger Analytics, offers placement assistance through GL Excelerate, a career assistance platform that brings together professionals who are looking for jobs and companies that are looking to hire professionals.

“In the initial months, we did see a drop in the number of opportunities being shared on the platform, but in the recent past, hiring activity has picked up again. In terms of hiring activity, we are almost at pre-Covid levels. We have seen a 2.5x growth in the demand for data science jobs in September compared to April 2020,” says Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning.

Arjun Mohan, CEO-India, upGrad says, “We have seen 1,000+ career transitions in 2020 till date. While the sudden Covid-19 outbreak did impact the transition rate by almost 50% during the current quarter, as compared to the previous quarter, our recent data now shows an upward trend with the number rising to about 70% as of now.”

The company has 300+ hiring partners on-board including names like Ola, HDFC Life, Flipkart, LTI, The Math Company, and The Economic Times amongst others.

Significant opportunities are opening in areas like Cyber security, AWS, DevOps, Data science, Digital Marketing, Business Analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Design Thinking, Full-stack Development roles, SEO, SEM and Social Media, say experts.

Full stack java, AI, Mobile app development, gaming and Digital marketing, analytics are areas of focus among students on these platforms to tap increasing demand.

Rameswar Mandali, CEO and Founder, SKILL MONKS says that the company that is into skilling courses is likely to assist 2,000 skill seekers through placement assistance and 500 through job guarantee.

“Job assistance and job guarantee programmes are long duration programmes ranging from six months to one year. We see a big demand for these programmes and the numbers are likely to go up substantially from here,” says Mandali.