Hiring Outlook May 2020

As we near the end of Lockdown 4.0, many companies have commenced their plans for the staggered restart. While a few companies have extended their WFH by another month till end June, others have chalked out the plans for partial operations from their offices. With a few large multinationals and domestic enterprises announcing 3 digit and 4-digit layoffs over the month, the market is abuzz about predictions for more that could be coming.

Despite the slowdown and some inevitable pruning of workforce expected, the recruitment engine hasn’t ground to a halt. However, a moderation seems to be in play with the overall active jobs count dropping by little over 20% in May as compared to April. The total active job openings dropped from 200K in April to 178K by Mid-May and the closing figures hovering at 167K.

These are jobs from direct employers that are active and accepting applications. The active job postings are tracked and curated from companies’ official job pages on LinkedIn and direct postings on top job boards. This does not account for hiring mandates that could be with recruitment and staffing agencies.

Job Types

Despite the reduction in overall count, which could be cyclical for this period, it is encouraging to note that over 90% of these openings are full time permanent opportunities. A notable 7% of these openings are internship and part time opportunities that have been announced. An increase of over 3% in this cluster denotes the openness of enterprises to tap into the freshers and recent entrants into the job market. It is definitely interesting to observe the appearance of remote working, work from home and telecommuting opportunities from enterprises. Over 7000 opportunities for remote working and full time WFH are currently active and accepting applicants.

Jobs by Levels

Enterprises are keeping their hiring funnels warm with entry level openings contributing to 30% of active openings. This can be interpreted in more ways than one, however fact remains that opportunities for entry level skills hasn’t dried out. A little further up, openings in the junior, associate and mid-senior roles contribute to about 40%. A little less than one-fourth of the openings are unclassified by level. Enterprises are also hiring at the top with about 3% of the active openings calling out for candidates at top positions like BU heads, Directors and above. 

Jobs by Industries

The overall mix of industries offering the active opportunities remains by and large same as previous months. With IT contributing to 40% of the openings, IT services closely follows with a little over 27%. The Banking and Financial Service sector comes third with 17% of the active openings. The other contributors to the active openings are the Internet enabled E-Commerce enterprises, Logistics, Edutech and Medtech players.

Jobs by Functions

IT and Technology function remains a top contributor with 44% of active openings. Engineering function has offered 24% followed by Sales and BD at 22%. The overall functional mix of opportunities has also remained by and large in line with previous trends.

 Jobs by Location

Close to 50% of active openings are from the top five metros.  Bengaluru leads the pack with a massive 21% of the openings. Delhi follows with 9%, Chennai at 8%, Hyderabad at 7% and Mumbai trailing at 5%.  

Prominent Employers

Some of the prominent employers with active openings for the month were  IBM, Accenture India, Infosys, Mphasis, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Amazon. The other players like VMWare, Standard Chartered and SAP who are traditionally known to have 3 and even 4 digit openings remained comparatively muted in their cohort of Top MNCs with active openings.

Top IT Openings

Some of the top IT openings active from large players in the study are Enterprise Solution Architect, Technical Program Management, Networking Specialists, Technical Engagement Architects, Operations and Services Management, Technology Specialist, SCRUM Masters, Robotic Process Automation Leads, Core Engineering, UX Architects, Cloud Security Architects and more. Though the openings are a mix of niche and volume roles, the fact that some of the roles are super specialist roles cannot be denied.