After three-quarter slump, hiring in India to pick up in Oct-Dec: Report

The report said the services sector had reported the strongest hiring outlook for the fourth quarter of 2017

Job seekers might soon have a genuine reason to cheer. After a slump of nearly three quarters, hiring activity is set to increase in the October-December period this year, shows a survey by human resource consulting company ManpowerGroup.
 
The rate of growth in hiring, however, would be far slower than the pace seen in the same period last year, Livemint reported on Tuesday, quoting the ManpowerGroup survey.

According to the ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey, as reported by Livemint, the net employment outlook for October-December stands at 19 per cent, significantly lower than the outlook (32 per cent) for the same period in 2016 but five percentage points higher that the outlook for the third quarter of 2017.
 
Citing the global human resource consulting firm's survey, the report said that the services sector was pegged to hire the most number of people in the fourth quarter with the strongest sectoral hiring outlook at 23 per cent, up eight percentage points. The transportation and utilities sector came in second with a hiring outlook of 20 per cent, the mining and construction sector came in third (19 per cent), public administration and education sector fourth (18 per cent), wholesale and retail trade sector fifth (17 per cent), manufacturing sector sixth (14 per cent), and finance, insurance and real estate sector seventh (12 per cent).
 
A G Rao, group managing director at ManpowerGroup India, told the financial daily: "The demand is especially high for e-commerce companies, logistics, FMCG, hospitality, retail, supply chain, and transport." The report added that the survey, which involved 5,005 employers across the country, showed positive hiring intentions across all seven industry sectors and all the four regions for the fourth quarter. Out of the four regions, the survey showed that the strongest hiring outlook was reported by North Indian employers.
 
The group's survey for the third quarter of 2017 had showed that hiring plans for that period were the "weakest reported since the survey began 12 years ago".
 
One of the reasons cited for increased hiring was the festive season.
 
As reported earlier, Amazon on Friday announced it has created more than 22,000 seasonal employment positions across its India network this festive season.
 
"In our effort to provide a seamless shopping experience, we are excited to announce that we are enhancing our teams significantly with two times the number of associates working in the Amazon fulfilment network and customer service sites," Akhil Saxena, vice-president (India customer fulfilment) at Amazon India, said.
 
According to an August report that cited CARE Ratings Chief Economist Madan Sabnavis, employment in corporate India grew by 3.5 per cent from 3.94 million jobs in 2015-16 to 4.08 million jobs in 2016-17. The services sector, which constitutes about 30 per cent of the sample set, employed 60 per cent of the workforce in 240 companies. The findings were part of a CARE Ratings study that looked at 812 companies with aggregate sales of Rs 36.1 lakh crore to assess the movement in employment in 2016-17, compared with 2015-16. 

Incidentally, while addressing the students of the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday, Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi said: "India cannot afford to grow and create jobs at the current rate. If we continue at the current rate, if India cannot give the millions of people entering the job market employment, anger will increase and it has the potential to derail what has been built so far. That will be catastrophic for India and the world beyond it."