Remote working in India is enabling companies to keep their temporary and permanent hiring ratio between 30:70 and 35:65, against the pre-Covid ratio of 20:80, reports LiveMint citing research from staffing firms.  According to the firms, companies are now comfortable working with a wider talent base spread across the country and factors such as educational background and location are becoming less important.

Sudeep Sen, business head, industrial manufacturing and engineering, and general staffing, TeamLease Services Ltd said, "We have seen a spike of 9-12% in terms of contract staff. Some of this is definitely because of the outbreak of the pandemic and the learning from it. It is also about flexibility in the workforce model because of fixed time-based projects, the ability to keep costs under control, the influx of the digital wave, and focus on increasing employee productivity.”

Sectors such as manufacturing, construction, chemicals, energy, power, automobile, and infrastructure are hiring temporary workers to meet seasonal spikes in orders and revised turnaround time to meet targets. Healthcare, e-commerce, and consumer sectors are also hiring more temporary workers to meet rising delivery demand.

“Usually, frontline roles which are repetitive in nature, can easily become temporary, whereas roles that are supervisory and above, could easily be in the permanent category," said Yeshab Giri, director, staffing, Randstad India.

"As most organizations embark on their digital transformation journeys, they undertake many short-term projects for which they need quality talent for a fixed duration. This results in the creation of short-term roles where organizations need to leverage specialised workers. As workers with specialised skills are often limited, it results in talent shortage and high cost for an organisation to acquire and retain such talent," said Shibani Patel, vice president, Collabera India.