Indian job market witnesses boom again

India’s job scenario is not just recovering, its actually breaking past records. This year about 11.3 lakh jobs were added in the organised sector, the best figure in four years, says a survey.

In 2008, when the global recession had just begun to sink in, a meagre 6.7 lakh jobs were added and a recovery-mode-2009 brought 9 lakh jobs, still lower than the peak of 10.3 lakh jobs in 2006, says the Ma Foi Randstad Employment Trends Survey.

According to analysts, the country’s job market is riding a wave of positive sentiment. And even with the West still not completely out of the slump, Indian employers are building up capacity in anticipation of future growth.

Healthcare is the biggest growth engine with 2.6 lakh hirings followed by hospitality, real estate and construction, information technology (IT) and information technology enabled services (ITeS). The IT & ITeS sector has actually broken the 97,000 forecast to add 1.16 lakh jobs.

The figures are affirmed by job portals. According to Monster.com, online placement opportunities in November 2010 exceed November 2009 by a robust 26 percent.

Monster’s peer Naukri.com too resonates similar trends. It says the the recovery of jobs in the IT sector was indicated in February this year when its employment index rose 25 per cent over that in January 2010.

Campus placements too seem to be picking up and experts say early indications of hirings by IT and automobile companies suggest record highs in recruitments for the coming months.

The MCKV Institute of Engineering, outside Kolkata, has already received a large number of campus recruitments for the graduates of next year from tech sectors, including 11 from Mahindra & Mahindra alone.

About 90 percent of 2010 pass-outs too saw direct placements in key players in IT, automobile, telecom and electronics.

An elated Vice Principal Tirthankar Datta told IBNS the engineering college is enjoying the “significant change” in the job market.

Datta said the 2008 slowdown had caused a great deal of worry and placements were actually deferred by a few months due to the uncertainty in the industries.

And its not just the engineering and tech sectors that are experiencing the boom. Banking, financial services and insurance sectors registered the first monthly rise in five months in November, Monster.com says.

The figures are not just random isolated findings.

According to the latest global employment outlook survey by the staffing firm Manpower, India actually beats China to be the be top destination in the world for job creation in the first quarter of 2011.

The firm surveyed 64,000 human resource directors and senior hiring managers from public and private concerns worldwide, quizzing them about their expectations for hiring during the coming months, to come up with its list.

India takes the leading position with a whopping 42 percent net hiring outlook for the first quarter of 2011, beating China’s 40 percent. Taiwan and Brazil follow next with 37 and 36 percent respectively.

In Manpower’s survey, net hiring outlook refers to the the percentage of employers surveyed who expect to decrease their employment subtracted from those who expect to increase them.

Connecting the dots between the mood of the industry and the appointment letters, some analysts believe that Indian employers are actually playing it safe.

Either way, for prospective job seekers in the country, the road looks a very gratifying one.