Decoding India’s Hiring Trends: What will we see more of in the rest of 2018?

India’s talent market for the rest of 2018 and into 2019 will be focused on candidates adapting to change to keep up with the trends in their sector in order to keep their skills sharpened and stay relevant in the employment market.

According to Naukri.com’s report, ‘Hiring Outlook 2018’, showed that 67% of 1,500 recruiters polled expected new job creation during the first two financial quarters of 2018. 76% respondents in IT industry were optimistic about job creation, construction and engineering (69%), banking & finance (64%) and automobiles (65%). These strong hiring trends to continue for the rest of 2018.

Sectors which are being reshaped by technology is creating new roles, but also different demands for those in existing jobs. Vijay Varier from The Edge shares what it means for India’s job market in order to keep pace with technological innovations and marketplace challenges.

India continues to Boom in the Big Data, Technology, Quants, Governance, Risk, Compliance, Audit, Compliance and Automation roles

Quants and Computer Engineers: With finance firms embracing new forms of finance automation, the industry is in the middle of an adoption phase and is aggressively moving to algorithmic trading systems. Quant candidates in India on average get up to 4 or 5 openings to apply to in a week from domestic trading companies to large MNCs – all are looking for specialists who will slice and dice the right data.

Audit, Governance, Risk and Compliance: The risk landscape has come a long way since its conception and integration in to the business. Today, in financial services, we are increasingly seeing enterprises push risk management responsibilities down to the front lines. While auditing is enabling organizations to tackle risks like data breaches by looking at governance over new technology.

Big Data or Data Analytics: Open source big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark and others are dominating the big data space, and that trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Specialists in the Big Data or Analytics will continue to see a huge demand and will need to continue upskilling their existing skillsets.

Industrial Automation: India has just recently progressed in this field and there will be an upsurge demand for Analyst, PLC, SCADA programmers who control and monitor systems with logical programming. For domains like supply chain, procurement, assembly lines, logistics, warehouse and inventory management – automation is highly beneficial for the smooth functioning of work tasks in a centralised manner.

Financial Services, Information Technology and Healthcare will have the highest job creation as industry sectors

Financial Services: The demand for more manpower has gone up and to meet the requirements of their increasing customer base, each financial institution needs to be well-equipped and have a skilled workforce to serve the needs of those unbanked and in the under banked segment. A rise in debit card use, e-wallet and e-banking transactions have expedited the government’s plan of transforming India into a modern cashless society. Most of the urban customers have leapt to mobile apps over net banking for a real-time fund transfer. Hence, banks are focusing on delivering a seamless customer experience across various touch points.

Information Technology: Improvements in financial services and digital businesses, especially an increase in digitization investments, automation and having a conducive investment climate are expected to drive business growth.

Healthcare: The Indian healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing industries. Conducive policies for encouraging FDI, tax benefits, favorable government policies coupled with promising growth prospects have helped the industry attract private equity, venture capitals and foreign players thus creating more opportunities.

Manufacturing Sector:  Government initiatives has played an instrumental part for manufacturing, giving the sector a boost. There is an upsurge in demand of professionals from niche domains such as R&D, product innovation, business transformation and change management, the latest software implementation and so on.

Telecom: The next billion internet users are ditching computers for mobile phones, hence resulting in an increase in the growth rate of digital transformation in India’s telecom sector. With the growth of e-commerce, e-learning, and e-governance, telecom providers have been a facilitator in the economic growth of India.

Retail: Online platforms such as Amazon India and Flipkart facilitate start-ups and small firms to operate in a global market from their first day of business. Intelligent transportation networks, fast logistics, and delivery of services is aiding the growth of retail and manufacturing sector in India.

An overlying trend across these functions and industries will be a continued look at diversity hiring. The effectiveness and commitment to achieving this varies significantly from company to company, from lip service to clear corporate targets being set to achieve specific % at different levels of an organisation and revisions in corporate policies towards maternity leave to encouraging women to return to the work force. Either way there is no ignoring the strength of momentum towards achieving a more balanced work force in corporate India.

The article is authored by Vijay Varier. He has over 10 years of experience in recruitment in the India market and covers a range of sectors including BFSI, ITES, Healthcare, FMCG, Real Estate, O&G, Manufacturing and IT.

To tap into some of India’s best talent and gain more insights, drop a note to Vijay at vijay@theedgepartnership.com.