Women 'deliver' mindset change as online shopping booms
The year 2021 was marked by an increasing focus of organisations in the delivery space to achieve gender parity at workplace indicating a change in perception that delivery work is not appropriate for women.
This trend is likely to take root in 2022 onwards and open space for women to enhance their contribution to the delivery segment to 15% in 2022 up from around 7-10% of the overall hiring requirement per month of delivery staff across industries from food delivery to e-commerce in 2021, says a report by Vahan, a technology start-up that enables companies to hire blue-collar workers at scale.
India has over 250 million blue-collared workers, and this number is growing with a decline in agricultural employment and the addition of around 7-8 million new college graduates to the workforce every year, 60% of which lack employability skills and end up joining the blue/grey-collar workforce. This presents a massive opportunity for placement in the blue-collar industry.
Despite the growing cases of the highly infectious Omicron variant of Covid-19 across the country, India’s blue-collar segment is anticipating higher demand growth for workers across the delivery category in 2022.
Vahan expects the year 2022 as one of further acceptance of online shopping behaviours by consumers across categories and this emerging situation will lend support to a massive surge in demand for delivery workers where metros will contribute over 60% of the overall demand in 2022 followed by tier two and tier three cities.
The start-up witnessed rapid demand for delivery workers in the August to November 1st week period last year fuelled by contests, discounts, incentives, etc. running across the board around the IPL season and T20 world cup.
A rapidly growing cohort of consumers identifies speed, convenience, and quality as the most important elements of a positive customer experience. “This trend is likely to hold true in the near future where grocery delivery service providers will extend quick commerce service to attract and retain customers,” the report said.
Vahan data shows that the grocery delivery service providers offered quick commerce and narrowed the delivery radius to 2-3 km during the festive season last year. This stoked cyclist demand and brought more temporary workers thereby increasing the hiring pool. The company is expecting a month-on-month increase in demand close to 30% across industries in 2022 as against 25% across industries in 2021 with the food delivery category as the major contributor.
“The blue-collar job market in India is set to repeat its astounding growth performance in 2022 as online shopping behaviour and preference for speedy delivery takes root in the country,” said Madhav Krishna, Co-founder and CEO, Vahan.
Vahan is currently recruiting more than10,000 people a month and has already placed over 1 lakh people across 200 cities in India.