Launched in 2004, Indeed is a worldwide job listing website that provides job seekers access to millions of openings around the globe.
Commenting on the recent report by Indeed on the overall hiring scenario, Sashi Kumar, Head of Sales, Indeed India, says that the hiring activity has recovered a great deal as compared to February 2020 when the pandemic hit for the first time. The hiring activity is largely driven by the IT sector and predominantly software jobs because of the economy getting digitised as a result of the pandemic. Additionally, areas of the consumption economy such as food and retail saw a significant improvement in the hiring activity.
“For the food industry, it is about 52 percent up and for retail it is 39 percent up from the previous year, though we are still not back to pre-pandemic levels,” says Sashi.
There has been an increased focus on hygiene and sanitation and thus jobs related to that sector has grown tremendously as well. As much as 60 percent increase in jobs in housekeeping, executive housekeepers, cleaners, etc.
Every year, there is an increase in retail openings driven by the festival season, explains Sashi. A significant interest was noticed in the delivery roles in the last couple of months, which is likely to continue into the festival season.
He mentions that during the first wave of the pandemic, there was a complete shutdown of the economy due to which there was a drastic fall in the hiring economy. However, in the second wave of the pandemic, some sectors were shut while some were open.
“Even in places which were very severely impacted by the pandemic, not everything shut down,” says Sashi. Thus, in 2021, there was no significant loss of jobs noticed as compared to 2020.
Sashi says, “Salary is an outcome of demand and supply”, and hence, there is no uniformity when it comes to salaries. There is a significant increase in salaries noticed in sectors where the demand is high and there is a shortage of labour. He adds that in the blue-collar segments, there are specific demands for roles that are related to the ecommerce economy.
He shares that Indeed is sector agnostic and therefore, a job seeker can find all kinds of jobs on the platform irrespective of the sector. However, the company’s focus is to dramatically collapse the time taken by a jobseeker to look at a job, gather interest, research, apply, get screened, and get to the interview using specific products such as Indeed Hiring Platform.
He says that broadly there has been an eight percent increase in the number of roles available as compared to 2020. “We are in a significantly good shape in the sense that at least we have more openings now as compared to when the pandemic hit us,” says Sashi.
There is still some contraction noticed in the services-oriented sectors where some amount of physical proximity is involved. However, sectors that are using technology to seamlessly deliver services without human contact has witnessed a fair amount of recovery.
“We will see a secular recovery in jobs once we are able to stabilise our situation with regards to the pandemic,” says Sashi.
