Amidst the second wave of the pandemic that has taken the country by surprise, the top five metros —Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai— together have contributed 43 per cent of the overall active jobs, accounting for 86,000 plus jobs in April 2021.
Slow recovery
The white-collar jobs scenario in India, as per the Active Jobs Outlook report by Xpheno, the specialist staffing solutions firm suggests that while the job market does appear to be in recovery mode, the pace is definitely not as was expected. In March, these very five metros had together added 32,000 more jobs. Mumbai alone witnessed the sharpest dip in active job counts at 40 per cent, followed by Chennai at 33 per cent and Bengaluru at 27 per cent. There was a 27 per cent drop in active jobs in April, as compared to March, in Delhi too. The lowest drop was witnessed in Hyderabad at 13 per cent.
Accounting for 15 per cent of overall active jobs, Bengaluru remained the top contributor, followed by Hyderabad at 8 per cent, Mumbai at 8 per cent, Delhi at 6 per cent and Chennai at 5 per cent.
Amongst the big names that were actively hiring, were Dell, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Microsoft, Infosys, Wells Fargo, Google, Wipro, Citi, TCS, HCL, LTI, Cognizant, Paypal, Accenture India, Genpact India, Amazon, Oracle and JP Morgan Chase.
IT sector continues to reign
Although there was a drop in active job counts, the biggest contributor remained the information technology function. It generated 92,000 jobs in April, although lower than the 1,25,000 it did a month ago. The IT function was responsible for a significant 46 per cent of the active jobs in April, compared to 43 per cent in March.
In the engineering function, there were about 54,000 openings compared to 72,000 a month ago. In the IT space, there was a 26 per cent drop in the number of jobs, whereas in the engineering space, this drop was 25 per cent.
Sales and business development functions witnessed the sharpest drop of 44 and 47 per cent respectively, in April— almost half of March. Most organisations have been going slow on the hiring in these functions because the market conditions demanded it.
Within the IT cluster, the sharpest drop in jobs in April was witnessed in the Internet Enabled Services (ITeS) space at 35 per cent over the previous month. There was a 32 per cent drop in the software sector followed by a 23 per cent drop in the IT services sector in terms of active job openings compared to March. The BFSI sector also registered a 35 per cent reduction in active job openings.
