The festive year-end marked an upswing in hiring activity across all major metros, with retail, hospitality, and education sectors witnessing a significant year-on-year (y-o-y) growth in December 2021, according to the Naukri JobSpeak Index for the last month of the year gone by.

Sectors like travel and hospitality (+22%), retail (+20%) and education (+12%) have been showing good growth owing to the festive quarter and a rebound, says the report.

“While IT has continued to drive growth in hiring, it is heartening to see a comeback from sectors of hospitality and travel, retail, and real estate. We see a lot of talent shifting back to their cities of work with most companies drafting their return-to-work policies. As companies continue to press the pedal on their digital transformation journeys, the demand for certain functional areas and sectors will keep growing,” said Pawan Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Naukri.com.

Hyderabad leads hiring activity in metro cities

Top metro cities saw growth in hiring in December when compared with the same month of 2020. Hyderabad is leading with a 12% y-o-y growth followed by Bangalore (+11%), Mumbai (+8%), Pune (+4%), and Chennai (+6). Delhi was flat and Kolkata declined by 3%.

Amongst the emerging cities, Ahmedabad (+21%) recorded the highest growth, which was powered by the sectors of IT, Pharma, and Banking. Barring Ahmedabad, other tier-2 cities such as Kochi (-29%), Coimbatore (-17%), Jaipur (-12%), and Chandigarh (-12%) have shown a dip in hiring activity in Dec’21 vs Dec’20.

Hiring in real estate looks promising

The software & IT sector continues to grow with it growing by 8% Y-O-Y. Real estate sector showed promising signs by recording a growth of 8% in hiring activity for Dec’21. Apart from hospitality, education and retail which were leading the growth, other sectors that grew included BFSI (+3%) and Advertising (+18%).

Sectors such as insurance (-19%), BPO (-14%), and FMCG (-12%) de-grew as they saw a decline in hiring activity in December this year over the same period last year.

Hiring for freshers stays steady

Hiring for new jobbers and young professionals was steady in Dec’21 as demand for Freshers and professionals with 4-7 years of experience remained flat over LY. Demand was slightly affected for professionals in the 8-12 years (-4%) and 13-16 years (-9%) experience segments.

The Naukri JobSpeak is a monthly Index that calculates and records hiring activity based on the job listings on Naukri.com website month on month. The report shows hiring trends across industry sectors, geography, and experience level. More than 76,000 clients use Naukri.com, leading to the high reliability of data. The report does not cover gig employment, hyperlocal hiring or campus placement.