According to the latest results of MyHiringClub.com and Sarkari-Naukri.info Layoff Survey 2020, 68 percent of the employers surveyed have either started the layoff process or are planning to. The online survey covered 1,124 companies across 11 industry sectors in 25 major cities. Approximately, 8 in 10 companies have postponed hiring and laid off staff.
However, at a time when there is a noise of layoffs and pay cuts, some startups are looking at this as an opportunity to hire good talent. Most of these startups are from industries that have already seen a rise or are expecting a boost in business in this pandemic including e-commerce and its allied verticals, education tech, health tech, and gaming.
In a research done by an Indian startup ClickPost, which has become one of the leading logistics technology companies in Asia, 92% of respondents in the e-commerce Industry in India said they believe e-commerce volumes in most categories to be higher than pre-COVID levels by September 2020. Some of them have actually started seeing a rise already.
With social distancing and work from home being the new normal, people are opting for e-commerce sites to buy regular supplies. Until a vaccine is available many people will replace shopping malls and centers with online grocery, apparel, and other necessary goods stores.
“We have onboarded new clients during this pandemic. Supply chain intelligence has become more valuable to e-commerce companies during this time of lockdown. We are also expanding our human capital to meet this new demand. We have increased our headcount by more than 30% during the COVID period. We’ve hired and onboarded talent using remote working tools and have been successfully able to integrate them well within the team. However, onboarding new talent at this time has its challenges. For instance, procuring new laptops has been a task for us.” said Naman Vijay, CEO, and Co-Founder, Click post.
Another sector that has seen tremendous growth is “education tech”. As schools, colleges and coaching centres closed down following the spread of the Covid-19 virus, educational technology came to the rescue of students and teachers alike.
Classplus, Noida based ed-tech startup that enables coaching institutes to take their brick and mortar setups online, has also expanded its team and made strategic hires in the past two months and are hiring across engineering and business verticals.
“We are hiring because of the increasing scale of challenges and opportunities requires great talent to win it. Ed-tech is a great career choice too. It requires great empathy and a lot of grit but it reciprocates with great satisfaction of building for the future and the impact of radically contributing to someone’s life.” said Mukul Rustagi, Co-Founder and CEO of Classplus
Many other ed-tech companies like Upgrad, Simplilearn, Udemy are looking at creating at least 3000 new jobs. Most of these companies are hiring at entry-level, mainly in tech and product.
This pandemic has brought a considerable shift in the consumption pattern. Most of the people are changing their behavior to opt for safer options. E-commerce, deep tech, education tech, health tech, and pharma are a few industries that would see further uptick post lockdown. To applicants who have lost their jobs recently, startups from these verticals have given a ray of hope.
