Moonlighting refuses to fade as opportunities to make extra bucks proliferate

According to Amit Srivastava, Founder and CEO of Iona, even working from the office doesn’t mean employees are only logging in to company systems. (Illustration by Suneesh Kalarickal)

Background verification (BGV) firm OnGrid recently found out that a software engineer had worked for 15 organisations in a span of just two years (2021 to 2023). He joined nine organisations within six months, and at one point was simultaneously employed by five of them.

Similar cases have been reported by other background checking firms. Though many corporate offices have reopened for in-person attendance, moonlighting continues unabated, particularly in the IT industry.

After witnessing a dip and stability, OnGrid reported a 270 percent surge in moonlighting cases among employees, majorly software engineers, from April 2023 to January 2024. This trend is now the second most common issue for employment verification red flags after tenure mismatch.

Iona, a hiring and onboarding platform, saw a 15-20 percent jump in moonlighting in information technology (IT) roles such as Senior DevOps, UI/UX Designers and App Developers (specially iOS) with over 10 years’ experience in the last six months.

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After IT, Iona highlighted that banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) employees are pursuing secondary jobs in frontline sales roles.

HR consultancy firm CIEL HR, however, says things have improved overall, saying that it had found a 25 percent decline in moonlighting over the past six months. Aditya Narayan Mishra, its MD and CEO, said that moonlighting is more likely in roles that can be performed remotely, such as digital marketing, content creation, creative and web design, and certain IT and tech positions.

Why are employees still moonlighting?

BGV firms have a reconciliation engine that constantly trawls data from multiple sources, including bank statements, salary slips, experience letters, resignation proof, resumes/CVs, and Universal Account Numbers (UAN), among others, looking for anomalies. In fact, post-pandemic, they have added a specific category, called ‘moonlighting check’, or dual employment check, in their verification.

Overlapping dates and multiple transactions are red flags for the monitoring officer.

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BGV experts say factors such as economic uncertainties, the growth of the gig economy, and widespread adoption of remote work may be contributing to this substantial increase.

“Some companies only mandate office work for certain departments or roles, allowing flexibility for others. Additionally, employees may strategically manage their time to accommodate secondary employment during office hours or utilise freelancing platforms discreetly,” Piyush Peshwani, Co-Founder and CEO of OnGrid, told Moneycontrol.

According to Amit Srivastava, Founder and CEO of Iona, even working from the office doesn’t mean employees are only logging in to company systems.

“The majority of companies even in IT/Digital areas do not have enough controls to monitor everything a person does. For example, one can work on UX/UI using CorelDraw or Adobe etc softwares—with a licence provided by the company itself—and can design something for another organisation during office hours, easily share it on Freelancer, Upwork etc and get paid,” he said.

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Similarly for DevOps, he said employees can write complex scripts during office hours and submit them after reaching home to make money.

A demand-supply game

The reason certain job roles continue to be exposed to dual employment is because of the demand-supply mismatch, which has resulted in employees being offered handsome payouts in secondary roles, making them irresistible.

Machine Learning (ML) engineers, artificial intelligence (AI) scientists, data engineers, and others with niche skills are high in demand, especially in the job market in the West.

Experts also highlighted that although IT reports the largest share of moonlighting cases, those such employment may not necessarily be with a rival or other IT company. For instance, a software engineer may be working as a social media manager for a non-IT company.

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Hence, the experts say companies should have a clear demarcation on what is allowed and what isn’t.

“Let your employees know that their ‘unrelated’ passion is all theirs to pursue without approval and will not be considered moonlighting. Provide an option to make extra money by working within your own organisation, maybe on a different project, to kill any burnout/boredom/misuse,” said Sudhakar Raja, Founder and CEO of BGV company TRST Score.