Demand for top-level talent shows uptick

All through the lockdowns, and even post the easing up, businesses have been looking for strong leadership. The demand for top-level talent has remained more or less intact for a year now and, with the economy opening up, looks headed for a pick-up.

Data sourced from jobs portal monster.com shows the demand for senior level professionals barely dipped 5%. It was the demand for mid-level employees that was affected during the lockdown, showing a decline of 12.5%. The impact was even more severe at the entry-level, with job requirements falling 12% during the lockdown and not yet recovering.

Sekhar Garisa, CEO, monster.com, told FE there has been a strong bounce back in job offers over the last quarter. The recovery has been good for senior-level profiles with a 4% increase seen over pre-Covid levels and equally good for mid-level roles where hiring is currently 3% higher.

While the numbers for entry-level positions improved in the October-December quarter, they are still down 3% and Garisa believes the segment will continue to see challenges as more companies want to hire ready-to-deliver talent and not invest in training.

“The job churn also allowed companies to hire relatively experienced talent at affordable costs especially in non-IT roles, lowering the demand for entry level roles,” he explained.

Nicolas Dumoulin,MD, Michael Page India, pointed out hiring activity had dropped by about 40% during the pandemic with entry and mid-level roles badly affected. “Many companies have downsized and put employment on hold. The senior-level hiring segment has stayed active compared to mid and junior level hiring,” Dumolin said.

Manpower Group has found that hiring recovered by 15% in December 2020 compared to November and senior director Alok Kumar expects 10% growth in January. “We are expecting hiring in January-March to be more than 18-20% as compared to October-December,” Kumar said. Garisa believes mid-level hiring will remain robust and grow the fastest as companies prepare themselves for a faster growth in the next two quarters.

Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder, Scaler and InterviewBit points out that with organisations rapidly digitising their operations to be able to scale up, the demand for IT professionsals has gone up. “Demand from MNCs and large companies is expected to be robust against the backdrop of new client wins and business deals in the last few months. VC-funded start-ups, especially in the ed-tech, gig-economy companies and logistics sectors, are also on a hiring spree for various roles across levels,” Saxena said.