As India completed a year of pandemic-induced Pan-India lockdown, Indeed analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on India’s job market between January 2020 and February 2021. Indeed, through its findings have uncovered several underlying trends, top jobs that witnessed high demand and the roles that lost their relevance among recruiters, owing to job disruption caused by budget cuts and the implementation of the new working order. However, the data from Indeed, which is a real-time indicator of labor market activity in India, has shown shoots of recovery in the hiring activity – towards the end of March 2021, hiring in India was down by 9%, still an improvement from June 2020 where it was down by 51%.
As Indeed looked at the various jobs across cities, the data suggests the demand (postings) for skilled technical job roles like Application Developer, Lead Consultant, Salesforce Developer and Site Reliability Engineer grew between 150%-300% with these roles being top sought after roles as of January 2020 to February 2021. The continued reliance of tech solutions across organizations and extension of work from home structure, businesses ramping up their technological infrastructures to scale up businesses and ensure smooth operations resulted in soaring number of postings for tech jobs. The data also found out that the employers’ demand for job roles like Field Engineer, Sales Lead and Editor that de-grew between 55%-85% during January 2020 and February 2021.
Indeed also studied the job postings across sectors in India’s key metro cities – Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Delhi that resonated with national findings. All the cities witnessed a growth in tech job roles except Kolkata where the job postings were concentrated in the Retail and Business Development sectors.
| City | Top Job Roles (Postings) | % growth |
| Bangalore and Chennai | Application Developer | 350% – 430% |
| Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune | Full Stack Developer | 60% – 100% |
| Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune | Software Architect | 27% – 120% |
| Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and pune | Development Operations Engineer | 49% – 60% |
With the continued adherence on social distancing and increasing reliance on online shopping, the job roles that require customer interfacing de-grew significantly. Among the jobs that were least sought after, Caller, Customer Service Representative, Sales Executive and Sales Representatives saw a sharp decline.
| City | Job Roles (Postings) | % de-growth |
| Bangalore and Delhi | Caller | 43% – 60% |
| Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai | Customer Service Representative | 14% – 47% |
| Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune | Sales Executive | 10% – 52% |
| Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune | Sales Representative | 22% – 53% |
Sashi Kumar, Managing Director, Indeed India, said “Our data shows India Inc’s inclination towards moving to a digital future in the post-pandemic world. The relevance of tech jobs continue to remain consistent both pre and post pandemic. The continued reliance on technological solutions to meet the needs for shopping, remote working and learning has amplified the importance of tech developers across industries and cities. Moreover, shifting focus towards scaling up businesses online and developing solutions to connect customers, employees, students and various other entities in the ecosystem has led to an escalated demand for tech jobs post-pandemic as well.”
