Job market finally hots up

According to India Skills Report 2015 launched at the 6th Global Summit on Skill Development organised by CII, the travel and hospitality sector would lead the way with over 50 per cent increase in hiring numbers in the coming year while in the core sectors such as oil and gas, power, steel and minerals, the fresh hiring is expected to increase by 38.3 per cent.

However, the report highlighted that out of about three lakh candidates who appeared for the Wheebox Employability skill test across domains, 62.78 per cent of them were found unemployable.

“Candidates should posses both soft skills and core skills. Soft skills are like better communication abilities, time management, team spirit and professionalism while core skills are the domain knowledge in their chosen areas. We have to address this challenge through targeted intervention, policy reforms and overhaul of our education system,” said Nishant K Roa, managing director, Linkedln

“There is no dearth of jobs, but a dearth of skills that the industry needs to focus,” said Adi Godrej, the chairman of Godrej Group.

Out of the total hiring being planned in FY16, 29 per cent will be engineers, 23 per cent will be graduates, 22 per cent will be management graduates and 11.4 per cent will be diploma holders. “Engineering will continue to dominate the hiring. With the kind of growth expected in sectors like automobiles, IT and core sectors, this is hardly surprising,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Over 72 per cent employers have expressed their preference to hire candidates in the age 30 years and below, has come as a good news at a time when 60 per cent of the country’s population is pegged to reach working age by 2020.

According to a report released by CII and HR companies Wheebox, PeopleStrong and Linkedin, the top states with employable skill pool are Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Kerala, Karnataka, UP, West Bengal and Orissa, though there is an overall upward hiring trend across 29 states and seven UTs.

However, what is more interesting is that employers are now scourging the social media to cherry pick their candidates and give greater weightage to internal referrals followed by job portal and social media. The trend of choosing candidate with the use of social media has increased from six per cent last year to 12 per cent this year, revealed the report.

One of the notable highlight of the study has been the challenge of corporates in maintaining gender diversity. Though the numbers have improved from last year to 38 per cent females in overall workforce from 34 per cent, it is the males who still are in majority.