IT Hiring Dips By 12% In April; Travel Sector Worst Hit With 36% Less Hiring (Sector-Wise Hiring Trends)

The hiring activity witnessed a drop by 15 percent as compared to March 2021 amidst the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forcing state governments to impose lockdown-like restrictions.

Less Severe Impact On Job Market

Although, the current impact on the job market is less severe than what we saw earlier in April 2020 given the lack of a strict nationwide lockdown.

According to the chief business officer, Naukri.com, Pawan Goyal, “The disruption caused by the second wave of COVID-19 has impacted the hiring activity however, the current impact is less severe than what we saw in April 2020 where the Naukri JobSpeak index declined by 51 percent month-on-month. This could be attributed to the lack of a strict nationwide lockdown being announced this time and the economy remaining open,”.

Less Impact On Healthcare And Insurance Sector

Due to the increased requirement for healthcare and life insurance during this time, there was less impact on hiring in sectors such as insurance (-5 percent), pharma/ biotech (-9 percent), and medical/ healthcare (-10 percent) in April 2021 over March 2021.

In the case of the IT-Software (-12 percent) sector, which remained shielded, declined less than the national average sequentially which drove robust hiring over the past few months.

in April-2021 vs March-2021, FMCG (-15 percent) and telecom (-15 percent) declined in line with the overall hiring trend.

More Impact On Retail Sector

The retail sector has also experienced a sharp decline of 33 percent in April 2021 owing to restricted operating hours or closure due to lockdowns in many parts of the country.

The sectors including hospitality and travel (-36 percent), banking/ finance (-26 percent) and teaching/ education (-24 percent) remain highly impacted sectors in hiring activity in April 2021 vs March 2021.

Metropolitan Mostly Affected

If we talk about metropolitans, except for Kolkata, the jobs market across metro and non-metro cities saw a downfall, while for the former it remained flat. 

The hiring trends in Mumbai were greatly affected by the huge surge of cases in Maharashtra with a sequential decline of 20 percent in April.

In the case of Delhi/NCR (-18 percent), also remained impacted sequentially, Bangalore (-10 percent), Chennai (-10 percent) and Hyderabad (-4 percent) were less impacted.

Lockdown caused the shutdown of schools, hotels, and non-essential offices.

Which led to a sequential decline in demand for professionals in the teaching/ education (-32 percent), hospitality (-32 percent) and marketing/ advertising (-26 percent) domains in April 2021.

Considering the hiring activity across experience bands, it saw an average decline of 13 percent in April 2021 vs March 2021.

In which, the 0-3 years’ experience band (-19 percent) got the most hit.

While the 13+ years’ experience band (-9 percent) remained the least impacted in sequential hiring thanks to the organization’s preference for experienced professionals.