The gap between salaries paid to temporary and permanent employees are coming down, spurred by rising demand for temporary staff especially in fast-growing sectors such as healthcare and pharma, says a report.
An analysis by HR firm TeamLease Services has shown the difference between temporary and permanent staff salaries came down to around 4% over the past five years.
The relatively low gap, compared to 8% in 2008, comes against the backdrop of stupendous rise of temp-staffing industry -- that is estimated to be growing as much as 20% annually in terms of salary hike.
The report said that higher staff demands in sectors like healthcare, pharma, telecom and energy is one of the major factor for narrowing salary gap.
"...With more and more traditional sectors recognising temporary hiring as a key people staffing strategy, the trajectory is clearly in the direction of growth in hiring and salary increments," TeamLease Services Senior Vice President and Co-founder Sangeeta Lala said.
"The depression in 2008-09 did have an impact on the temp staffing industry, but it did recover well as is evident from the analysis. Temporary staffing industry continued to clock double digit growth (between going up to 20%) year-on-year in terms of salary hike," the report said.
From a temporary salary perspective, healthcare and pharma have shown the most impressive growth over the years as salaries grew by 7.96% in 2010, followed by 12.07% in 2011 and 18.87% in 2012, indicating a nearly 45% growth every year.
On the contrary, telecom space which showed great promise in early 2009-2010 could not live up to the expectations and slumped to single digit growth in 2012.
In the year 2010, temporary salary in the telecom space grew by 7.7% and took a significant leap to 11.13% the following year. However in 2012, the salary growth slipped back to 7.62%.
The report revealed that there are certain industry-city pairs that are soon going to be impossible to beat, because they seem to be outperforming the market.
The most effective of these pairs in terms of incrementing salaries are automobile operations in Chennai, Food and hospitality business in Delhi, Mumbai's healthcare and pharma sector and IT space in Bangalore.
The report was examined among 318 different job profiles, 13 industries and 8 functional domains in 14 major locations in the country.
