With organisations across the globe speeding up the digitisation process in the face of remote working, the demand for techies and information technology (IT) professionals has gone up worldwide. According to a report by the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF), the demand for IT professionals has doubled since March 2020. Not surprisingly, with the job environment now improving slowly, the biggest challenge for the technology sector is to source quality talent and retain them.
Another report from Indeed reveals that more job seekers are hunting for ‘remote work’ or work-from-home options. In fact, the searches for such jobs spiked to 966 per cent in April 2021 compared to April 2020, as per data from the job site, Indeed.
The ISF report reveals that more organisations are willing to hire freshers now. The expectation to take on freshers has gone up from 6 per cent last year, to 15 per cent in 2021. The tech sector is the most willing to recruit freshers at 24 per cent, whereas 21 per cent of the telecom sector and 19 per cent of the e-commerce segment expect to hire freshers.
Due to the challenge of sourcing and retaining talent, the demand for temporary staffing has gone up. Most of the freshers are being sourced from campuses and imparted training before being assigned to various projects. The skills in demand are knowledge of artificial Intelligence, data science, cloud computing, information security and blockchain.
Organisations are working on upgrading their HR processes, with more focus on training and hiring contractual workers.
