India Skills Report: Hiring sentiment to improve in 2019

The findings were part of the India Skills Report 2019, put together by the human resource and technology company PeopleStrong and Wheebox, a global talent assessment company, in collaboration with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) along with partners like UNDP, AICTE, and AIU.

The positive outlook in hiring was attributed to stronger employment opportunities in software and hardware, automotive and travel and hospitality sectors.

After a high of 23 percent in 2015, the annual increase in hiring intent had slipped to 14 percent in 2016 and touched a low of 7 percent in 2017. There was a slight revival in 2018 when the intent rose to 10 percent.

The software industry is emerging from a couple of years of slow growth and lower/freeze in hiring.

India's top IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services said in October that it had a net addition of 10,227 employees in the September-ended quarter, which it claimed was the highest in 12 quarters.

The company is also going to make as many as 28,000 offers to entry-level graduates who appeared for a national qualifier test during the quarter.

Similarly, others like HCL Technologies have said they will hire as many as 30,000 people across all categories this year.

The India Skills Report found that design and analytics jobs would be the most sought-after, and demand was likely to increase for almost all profiles in technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“It is encouraging to see a positive hiring intent this year and even more to see tech hiring getting back in action. It is also heartening to see that the increase in hiring intent is not limited to organizations of a certain size, but it is spread across companies of different sizes and sectors,” said Pankaj Bansal, co-founder and CEO of PeopleStrong.

The report noted that even though hiring volumes might not reach the scale of 2010-11, the situation would still be better than what it was in the last 2-3 years.

Apart from software, engineering, automotive, travel and hospitality will see a considerable upswing in their hiring numbers next year.

According to the report, which surveyed over 1000 employers in different fields, almost 64 percent employers said they had a positive outlook on hiring.

Almost 20 percent employers said they will hire the same number of people as 2018, and only a few had a negative hiring outlook for 2019.

On gender diversity, the survey found that female employability this year increased to 46 percent from 38 percent last year.

Male employability score grew marginally to 48 percent from 47 percent last year. Of all the new hiring in 2019, almost 15-20 percent would comprise of women, the report further said.