White collar hiring falls 6% in Aug on caution in IT, auto sectors: Rpt

White collar hiring in India witnessed a 6 per cent year-on-year decline in August following cautious sentiment in IT, insurance, auto, healthcare and BPO sectors, a report said on Monday.

In August this year there were 2,666 job postings, as against 2,828 job postings in the year-ago period.

On a sequential basis, hiring went up by 4 per cent in August 2023, as against 2,573 job postings in July 2023, according to the 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.

"Jobspeak Index for August 2023, reveals optimistic hiring sentiments being driven by non-IT sectors such as oil and gas, hospitality, and pharma.

"The IT sector also showed positive signs, registering sequential hiring growth after declining for the past few months. This is a healthy indication of normalcy trends returning to white-collar job market in India," Naukri.com Chief Business Officer Pawan Goyal added.

The IT sector was a major laggard as new jobs created in the IT industry were 33 per cent lower compared to the high base value in August last year.

Besides IT, sectors such as insurance, auto, healthcare, and BPO, also showed cautious hiring sentiments with a dip of 19 per cent, 14 per cent, 12 per cent, and 10 per cent, respectively, in new job creation compared to August last year, it added.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas sector continued its upward trend with 17 per cent growth in hiring compared to August last year.

The job growth for this sector is highest in the cities of Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

Experienced Professionals with over 16 years of experience remained most sought after candidates, it stated.

Hospitality sector continued to hire aggressively and witnessed 14 per cent growth in new jobs created compared to August last year, it said.

Driven by a renewed focus on R&D, the pharmaceutical sector witnessed a 12 per cent growth in hiring compared to August last year, particularly strong in cities like Ahmedabad and Chennai.

Further, it revealed that the number of open job vacancies related to AI functions increased sequentially in August by 8 per cent.

The steepest jump was witnessed for ML engineers and full stack AI scientists, respectively, followed by other roles including data scientists and data analysts, it said.