Flexi hiring to show muted growth this festive season

Chennai: The gloom in the economy has hit temp staff hiring for the festive season.  Hiring mainly happens in the e-commerce sector, which is largely immune to the ecenomic vagaries.

Usually the second half of the year sees a spurt in hiring of temporary staff to meet the festive demand for additional manpower. The hiring, which starts around August, goes on till December. This festive season is expected to witness a 10 to 15 per cent rise in hiring over last year, as per Indian Staffing Federation estimates.

This is subdued growth when compared to the last year’s growth of 30 to 35 per cent. In the second half of 2018, different sectors had hired around two lakh people for temp jobs.

While most sectors are keeping a low profile, the demand is largely coming from the e-com sector.

E-com and retail companies are gearing up to recruit more temporary workers to meet the increased demand for extra hands in last-mile delivery, warehouse logistics and customer service roles, said Rituparna Chakraborty, President, Indian Staffing Federation

Aggressive hiring is expected for the top three jobs—delivery personnel and support functions, supply chain and logistics operations, and jobs at seller locations for packaging and warehouse management. Flexi hiring for junior level delivery and client relations staff and mid-management level personnel in finance, operations and digital selling are also seeing reasonable growth.

There is an increased demand for women in e-commerce companies for supervising operations, sorting centres, packaging and managerial roles in delivery stations, delivery associates in charge of hubs and delivery executives.

Also, tier-II and III cities are expected to see at least 15 per cent growth, as most of the e-com companies are aggressively exploring the smaller cities. Last year, tier II and III cities had accounted for 40 per cent of the e-com festive season sales.