'Hiring demand up 9% in May led by telecom, BFSI, import-export sectors'

Job demand continued to be on a growth trajectory in May, witnessing a 9 per cent rise year-on-year, mainly supported by telecom, banking, financial services and insurance and import and export sectors, a report said on Tuesday.

The job market continued to show growth for the second consecutive month of FY23 with a benchmark year-on-year recovery of 9 per cent in May, according to the Monster Employment Index (MEI).

However, the index levelled down by 4 per cent month-on-month reflecting cautious recruiter sentiments in May amid worries over high inflation driving up costs due to the current socio-economic scenario globally, it noted.

"The beginning of FY23 has shown positive hiring scales given the anticipated 5G roll-out and the recovery of several business segments across the country. So far, the Indian job market is faring well despite the current sentiment on sobered hiring," said Sekhar Garisa, CEO of Monster.com, a Quess company.

Recruiters have not scaled down their ambitions to hire talent and there is most definitely unmet demand in the market today, he stated.

"In terms of the job outlook, businesses will continue to grow, and we see this demand reflected in segments such as import and export, telecom, travel and hospitality and BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance), which continue to grow on the back of growing digitisation efforts," he added.

Industries such as telecom, BFSI and import/export have exhibited optimistic job trends contributing to the overall annual growth in job posting activity, it said.

With the pandemic behind us and supply chains back in place, import and export witnessed a rise in job postings for talent by 47 per cent, the highest-ever increase recorded over the past year for this segment.

Further, in line with the new wave of digitisation, cashless payments and digital money, job postings in BFSI (up 38 per cent) stayed steady, followed closely by telecom/ISP (up 36 per cent) which will witness further job amplification on the back of the anticipated 5G roll-out in India.

Meanwhile, travel and tourism (up 29 per cent) has exhibited a full recovery surpassing marginal and even negative escalation patterns observed over the last four quarters.

In fact, the segment has almost doubled in growth since the previous month (April), which recovered at 15 per cent annually, according to the report.

This apart, with offices ramping up to return to work full-time and the economy warily falling back to pre-Covid norms, sectors such as office equipment/automation (up 101 per cent), real estate (up 25 per cent) have seen promising growth patterns.

Retail (up 11 per cent) continued to hire with moderate growth this month, added the report.

The report revealed that having observed a dip since September 2021, media and entertainment sector continued on a steep slope of decline (19 per cent) indicating a long way towards post-pandemic recovery.

Online recruitment activity contracted in engineering, cement, construction, iron and steel (down 9 per cent) although minor improvement was seen last month.

Shipping and marine (down 4 per cent) also noted a first annual dip from a year-ago level, it added.

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

The report further revealed that tier II cities are well on their way to post-pandemic recovery with significant growth numbers, while tier I cities continue to fuel growth.

City-specific data indicated that Coimbatore (up 27 per cent) tops the chart once again surpassing growth numbers witnessed by top metro cities in India, tailed by Mumbai (up 26 per cent), according to the report.

Delhi-NCR and Hyderabad marked a 16 per cent annual growth in job opportunities, closely followed by Chennai (up 15 per cent), Pune (up 13 per cent), Ahmedabad (up 15 per cent), Bangalore (up 9 per cent) and Kolkata (up 6 per cent).

The BFSI industry particularly saw substantial hiring activity once again across key metro cities with the highest spike in Pune and Delhi-NCR, said the report.

Tier II job markets continued to fuel hopeful employment patterns this May 2022 across Baroda, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Kolkata, which reflected growing annual demand in the range of 2 to 12 per cent.

Job creation in said locations continues to emerge consistently since the previous month indicating bullish prospects for employment generation, it added.