Flexi-staffing in India is gaining traction among technology firms as they rush to meet the growing need for people with digital skills for short-term projects, reports LiveMint. The pace has intensified during the pandemic as a rapid shift towards digitalisation and automation has brought down the average tenure of projects. The IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) sector is leading the option of flexi-staff adoption, with around a dozen out of every 100 employees being contractual or flexi-staff, according to the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF). Meanwhile, data from Indeed showed the hiring of flexible or temporary staff in India climbed 22% in January from a year ago. Ramesh Alluri Reddy, director of managed services and professional services, Adecco Group India, said, "Agile-based DevOps (software development and IT operations) delivery involves short cycle times, and customers look to meet their needs using flexi-staffing. Customers prefer to have a core team of full-time employees, but they use contractual staff to be able to ramp up and down based on specific requirements to maximise efficiency.”

India's flexi-staff workforce is expected to reach 6.1 million this year from 3.3 million in 2018, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.7% during 2018-21, according to a report from the ISF. “A flexi-staffing strategy helps companies hire just-in-time, aligned with their business growth and needs, without having to bench, redeploy or retrain employees,” said Lohit Bhatia, president, ISF. "When a niche skill is required for a short-term project, organisations can choose to hire a contract employee or gig worker. Flexistaffing will manage such staffing peaks and troughs and help them scale up easily.”