Around 2 to 2.5 lakh seasonal as well as are expected to be created in India during the July-December period, and festive season hiring is expected to grow by 15 to 20 per cent, NLB Services, a global tech and digital talent solutions provider, said in a report.
With the festive season approaching, e-commerce, quick commerce, retail, logistics, travel, and hospitality platforms are preparing for the period when demand is the highest, PTI quoted the report as saying.
“The festive season is becoming a real-time stress test for India’s workforce with employers hiring earlier, looking beyond traditional talent hubs and increasingly relying on technology-enabled, flexible and ready-to-deploy talent,” PTI quoted NLB Services SVP and APAC Head Varun Sachdeva as saying.
“What was once a short-term response to seasonal demand is becoming a strategic opportunity to access new talent pools, assess capabilities at scale and create pathways to longer-term employment. The real impact of festive hiring, therefore, may extend well beyond the season itself,” he added.
The report is based on industry trends, sentiments of employers, and job postings for festive season.
Around 12-14 weeks ahead of the peak of the , employers begin their workforce planning, the report reveals. This helps them to build their talent pools while also reducing the pressure of compressed hiring cycles.
When demand becomes concentrated into shorter windows, this is when workforce readiness becomes a competitive advantage.
The report also said that last-mile delivery, warehousing and fulfilment, retail sales, customer experience, inventory management, field operations and hospitality will continue to account for a large chunk of requirements during the festive season.
When it comes to new-age operational roles, there will be around 15-20 per cent growth, the report reveals. These roles include dark-store inventory controllers, returns and refunds specialists, customer-resolution executives, marketplace operations professionals, fraud and transaction-support personnel, catalogue management executives and order-management specialists.
Tier-II, Tier-III cities catching up
Festive hiring is now not only limited to Tier-I cities, but now are becoming more geographically distributed into tier II and tier III cities. These areas will contribute around 45% of the total demand of hiring during the festive season.
The expansion of e-commerce, quick commerce, organised retail and regional fulfilment networks is driving demand across cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow, Indore, Surat, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, and Kochi.
The workforce is also becoming more diverse and inclusive, as per the report.
The talent pool is seeing increase in the number of freshers, women, and first-time workers.
In a number of categories, women in non-metro locations will account for 30 to 35 per cent of the new female hires.
With PTI inputs