White-collar hiring falls 11% annually in Jan, up 1% sequentially : Report

Hiring of white-collar workers fell 11 per cent on an annual basis in January, while it sequentially rose 1 per cent during the same period, a report said on Tuesday.

On a year-on-year basis, the overall hiring in the IT sector declined 19 per cent in January this year. However, healthcare, hospitality and FMCG witnessed annual job growth last month in an otherwise cautious market, according to Naukri JobSpeak Index.

The Naukri JobSpeak is a monthly index representing the state of the Indian job market and hiring activity based on new job listings and job-related searches by recruiters on the resume database of Naukri.com.

As per the report, hiring for niche AI-related roles such as machine learning engineer and full stack AI scientist jumped 46 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively, year-on-year.

On an annual basis, hiring in the healthcare sector rose 7 per cent in January with maximum increase in demand for administrative roles.

Recruitment in the travel and hospitality sector recorded a growth of 5 per cent y-o-y.

With the ongoing boom in both domestic and international tourism, demand for restaurant managers and service managers remained at elevated levels and hiring in this sector was high in Bangalore and Mumbai, the report said.

Meanwhile, sectors like BPO witnessed a 16 per cent degrowth in hiring, insurance saw a decline of 8 per cent, education and retail sectors reported a fall of 7 per cent each.

"The significant rise in AI-related jobs is indicative of the changing skill requirements in the IT sector, while the positive hiring sentiment in healthcare, hospitality and FMCG reflect a strong domestic economy," Naukri.com Chief Business Officer Pawan Goyal said.