KOLKATA: As the country shops online, and leading players including Amazon and Myntra open up their sales ahead of Independence Day, demand for temporary staff, particularly in delivery roles, is seeing a spurt led by ecommerce, staffing firms such as Quess, TeamLease and Manpower said.
The other big segments recruiting temporary staff in sales, advisory, content development etc include health insurance companies and insurance aggregators followed by edtech sector, leading to creation of more jobs at a time when most industries continue to reel under the impact of the Covid-19 crisis.
Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Delhivery, Swiggy, Vedantu, Unacademy, PNB MetLife and Tata AIG are among the companies hiring, said staffing firms.
“While it is early days, given the trends of sales, ecommerce reporting between 50-100% growth of order volume and new customers on their platforms – it should be a good year as rest of the economy reopens and restarts,†said Lohit Bhatia, president – workforce management at Quess Corp. The staffing firm has seen hiring demand from ecommerce as well as delivery companies in essential services like groceries, food, medicines, etc.
Alok Kumar, senior director at Manpower, said the firm has approximately 5,000 open mandates currently for delivery staff and fulfilment centres (warehouses) from the ecommerce sector. “Most of the new mandates post-Covid have come from ecommerce due to surge in the demand of home deliveries,†he said.
Snapdeal, whose shipments are handled by third-party logistics providers such as Delhivery, Ecom Express, Xpressbees, said it was working with them towards the creation of additional delivery capacity to handle increasing orders. “This will include new hiring by our partners and also encouraging delivery staff on leave to resume work,†said a Snapdeal spokesperson.
In end-May, Amazon had announced that it would add 50,000 seasonal roles to meet the online surge in demand.
Ratnesh Verma, founder at on-demand delivery service Pidge, said it is adding 15% to its delivery workforce every week.
Saurabh Deep Singla, chief HR officer at Ecom Express, said he is bullish on the industry growing at a higher rate than before Covid-19. The company plans to add 7,000 employees to its existing 30,000 workforce during the July-September quarter.
TeamLease is getting maximum mandates from large e-grocers, food specific app-based companies, app-based medicine delivery companies, and essential non-mall large format retail companies, said co-founder Rituparna Chakraborty.
Typically, the festival shopping season begins in July-end and August, and continues till the end of December, with different levels and peaks.
Each year India sees shortages during season time when most ecommerce and delivery-based organisations hire simultaneously, staffing firms said.
This year, according to Quess’ Bhatia, the shortage will be more acute in certain cities where the migrant and daily wagers have left. As a result, the shortages will lean over other adjacent sectors and draw from those sectors as well by additional wages, increments and incentives, he said.
According to Kumar of Manpower, companies are willing to pay more than their existing slabs and are also giving one-time Covid joining bonuses to candidates who are joining in this current scenario. “Apart from this, there are hardship allowance also being offered by the companies,†he said. “Incentives on regular attendance are also on the cards.â€
