With economic activity showing impressive recovery from COVID’s grip, hiring demand witnessed a 6% year-on-year growth in the month of March 2022, highlights the latest Monster Employment Index (MEI). 

Even as a marginal dip of 2.4% was witnessed in month-on-month hiring activity, owing to appraisal season, the Index remained positive from an annual perspective as recruitment activity continued across a broad range of sectors.

In the month of March 2022, online recruitment activity exceeded the year-ago level in 11 out of the 13 cities monitored by the index. All metros registered a double-digit growth on an annual basis.

Mumbai biggest job market, followed by Coimbatore

Mumbai (up 21%) led all the monitored cities for the first time on a yearly basis followed by Coimbatore (up 20%), Chennai and Hyderabad (up 16% each). E-recruitment activity in Bengaluru (up 15%) charted a positive trend but weakened from previous months. While Pune recorded 12% growth, Kolkata and Delhi-NCR registered a growth of 13% each.

Tamil Nadu’s investment in SEZs and intent to grow into a deep tech startup base has boosted demand for jobs in the two cities that have witnessed the emergence of leading fintech and SaaS start-ups. Flushed with investor money, Mumbai continues to rule as the financial capital with several fin-tech companies setting up base, boosting hiring in the market. Bengaluru and Pune are emerging as the secondary hubs for fintech start-ups with several entrepreneurs wanting to tap into the latent tech talent available in the markets.

BFSI leads as growth driver on fintech and crypto boom

Hiring demand in March 2022 was driven by banking/financial services and insurance (BFSI) which showed remarkable improvement (up 37%) followed by telecom/ISP (up 17%) and production and manufacturing (up 16%). Additionally, jobs rebounded for hospitality and travel (up 11%) personnel after a long time and experienced significantly improved demand levels annually.

However, engineering, cement, construction, and iron/ steel (down 20%) continued to witness a year-on-year decline in the series since April 2020, registering the sharpest deceleration among sectors. The pace of the growth moderated further for media & entertainment (down 16%) and FMCG, food and packaged food (down 13%) industry and slide down in March 2022 annually, according to MEI data.

Tech, finance and HR roles in high demand

In terms of functions, IT-Hardware and software, HR and admin along with finance and accounts job roles marked a double-digit growth in all metros. More and more organisations have hired top management level employees (up 34%) followed by mid-senior level (up 22%), intermediate level (up 20%) and senior-level (up 13%). Entry-level jobs witnessed a growth of 8% on the back of campus hiring steeping in the JFM quarter.

In BFSI, roles in financial statement, wealth management, investment banking and cyber-security have seen increased job openings. In terms of tech jobs, the emergence of Metaverse and its potential applications has created a lot of career opportunities in new skill areas.  While brands and enterprises continue to value creativity and human-centered design with tech-enabled applications, job roles such as design architects, software designers, system validation engineers, 3D artists, AR/VR maintenance and support, and design/graphics engineer are expected to be in high demand in the coming months.

“Two years into the pandemic, it is heartening to see that the Indian economy has overcome setbacks and challenges with hiring momentum exceeding pre-Covid levels by 6% this year compared to 2020. Sectors such as banking and telecom have undoubtedly contributed to the overall revitalisation of employment generation in the country. It is also encouraging to see a substantial rise in business activity across tier-2 cities given that smaller cities have historically feathered the adverse effects of the pandemic crisis with a surplus talent pool to boot. As India Inc. continues to adopt the hybrid and back-to-office work models, we hope to see a continued recovery and a step forward to normalcy in the coming months,” said Sekhar Garisa, CEO - Monster.com, a Quess company.