Silver lining amid startup lay-offs: Sectors hiring for recently axed roles

The overall hiring funnel for roles and skills across tech and non-tech sectors remains warm, irrespective of the layoffs reported among Indian startups. (Illustration by Suneesh Kalarickal)

Lay-offs have suddenly become the talk of the town again. This time, multinational companies (MNCs) have taken their place among start-ups that are letting employees go. But all is not bad for India Inc. employees. Some sectors have performed robustly and are not shying away from increasing their headcount, some specifically for those axed roles.

The highest volume of lay-offs among start-ups has been in business development, sales, and software engineering and technology, according to talent solution specialist Xpheno. The exits span a wide range of roles and skills across all three functions.

In business development, the roles include business development executives, senior BDEs, business development team leads, business development process executives, customer relationship management executives, and coordinators.

Sales roles include senior sales executives, pre-sales executives, sales team leads, senior sales representatives, senior sales engineers, sales officers, sales and service specialists, and field sales agents.

In software engineering and technology, the roles include senior project engineers, software test engineers, Android/ iOS developers, QA/ QC engineers, technology analysts, Linux system administrators, business intelligence developers, technical team leads, SQL/ Oracle database administrators, and tech support engineers.

“There are also other functions like operations, marketing and advertising that have seen talent reductions over the past three to six months among start-ups,” said Kamal Karanth, cofounder of Xpheno.

Which sector is hiring for these roles?

While volumes have dropped in comparison to last year, Karanth said it is not the end of the road for talent being laid off. “Sufficient hiring action is visible for talent on the move to aspire for and work towards,” he said.

The business development, sales, and software engineering and technology functions that have been hit are also among those that have perennial hiring action across sectors.

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On overall hiring amid the layoffs, the five-month decline in active job counts was arrested in October, according to Xpheno. “The month registered a recovery and marginal rise of 7 percent in active job counts in comparison to September 2022,” it said.

Active jobs are published opportunities that are accepting applications. The overall hiring funnel for roles and skills across the tech and non-tech sectors remains warm, irrespective of the layoffs reported among Indian start-ups.

The top five sectors with active job openings for axed start up roles and skills are: tech services and products, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), funded tech start-ups, hospitality, and telecom.

“These sectors collectively have over 45,000 active job openings that cater to the axed roles and skills,” Karanth said.

The tech services and products sector had over 80 percent of the active openings, Xpheno said. Opportunities in BFSI accounted for over 8 percent, followed by funded tech start-ups at 6 percent. Hospitality and telecom had 4 percent of the active openings.

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Apart from the openings for the axed roles offered by the top five sectors, an additional 60,000 active openings are available across other sectors, including manufacturing, retail, logistics, FMCG, healthcare, infrastructure, automotive and direct-to-consumer (D2C).

Which sector is hiring in general?

Amid the buzz of recession, layoffs and cost-cutting, 73 percent of employers in the services sector in India are keen to expand their workforce in the third quarter of FY23, according to the TeamLease ‘Employment Outlook Report’ Q3 (October to December 2022).

Hiring is robust in the e-commerce, retail, agriculture and agrochemicals, healthcare, insurance and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors.

“Also, as the holiday season is approaching, travel and tourism along with aviation is also hiring due to increased demand,” said Ajoy Thomas, VP and business head at staffing company TeamLease Services.

Jobs platform Monster said hiring for automation roles increased 34 percent, with companies seeking to maximise efficiency and productivity through tech.

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The rollout of 5G services has led to a 9 percent uptick in telecom hiring. Several companies in the telecom market are expanding their digital footprints and are looking for tech talent armed with specialised knowledge, according to the Monster Employment Index.

This demand is majorly driven by skills such as devops, full stack, react native, cloud, open stack, edge computing, robotic process automation, Juniper, big data and Python, which account for 72 percent of the total jobs in the sector.