Hiring activity in India grew by 26% in November 2021 when compared to November 2020, according to the latest Naukri JobSpeak Index.

This hiring growth came on the back of increased retail fervour, festive hype and the opening up of educational institutes in India.

The onset of the festive season marked the comeback of the retail sector, which showed a 47% year-on-year increase in November 2021. Another sector which traditionally benefited in the festive season was Hospitality/Travel (58%).

In a bid to fall back to normalcy, schools are primed to reopen across the country; the education sector (54%) experienced a resultant uptick in hiring.

Hiring activity in November 2021 has also grown in major job creation sectors including banking/financial services (30%) and IT-Software (+50%), as compared to November 2020. While the Telecom/ISP (91%) industry continues to grow, the index reported a muted growth in Medical/ Healthcare (3%) and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) (6%) sectors.

Pawan Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Naukri.com said, “Being two of the worst impacted sectors of the pandemic, the hospitality/travel and retail industry have stood out in their recovery. Riding the festive wave in the past few months, these sectors have grown by 63% and 56% annually from Sept 2021 – November 2021.”

Continuous growth of the IT-Software and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sectors have enabled metro cities to outperform their tier - II counterparts in the annual growth charts. The average annual growth recorded in metro cities was 39% whereas non-metros grew at a slower pace of 16%.

Hyderabad (47%), Pune (47%) and Bengaluru (49%) recorded the highest growth in November 2021. Hiring was also positive in Mumbai (36%), Delhi/NCR (34%) and Chennai (35%) while Kolkata (23%) saw relatively slower growth.

Among the non-metro cities, Ahmedabad (61%) saw the most growth in November 2021 followed by Coimbatore (28%).

Meanwhile, hiring across all experience bands was positive in November 2021 as compared to November 2020 with demand for senior professionals belonging to the 8-12 years (37%) bracket seeing the most traction. Demand was also positive for professionals in the 4-7 years (30%), 0-3 years (27%), 13-16 years (26%) and above 16 years (20%) brackets.