Bangalore takes bigger hit in hiring

The trend holds true both on a monthly and an annual basis - that is, for July 2009 over June 2009, and for July 2009 over July 2008.

For all sectors, Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad have shown an increase in hiring in July 2009 over the previous month. Bangalore leads the decline, accompanied by Chennai, Pune and Kolkata.

Naukri JobSpeak is an index of job listings added to the site every month by recruiters who are clients of Naukri.com.

To calculate the index, job listings added to the site in July 2008 have been taken as a base of 1,000.

The study concluded that hiring activity was up 4 per cent in July 2009 over the previous month in IT-software, 7 per cent in IT hardware and networking and 3 per cent in ITeS and BPO.

Hiring in telecom saw a dip of 10 per cent in July compared with June, while the monthly decline in the case of banking and financial services and insurance was 7 per cent and 3 per cent, respectively.

Hiring in real estate and retail went up by 16 per cent and 10 per cent respectively, indicating a possible reversal of a general trend of decline over the last year.

Secular trend

Compared with July 2008, the decline in hiring shows a more secular trend.

In most cases the drop has been over 30 per cent, the exceptions being telecom (21.5 per cent), pharmaceuticals (0.3 per cent), chemicals (5.6 per cent), education (9.5 per cent) and hospitality (13.4 per cent).

The maximum drop in hiring was in the case of real estate (39.1 per cent) and retailing (42.4 per cent). Taking a range of infrastructure, manufacturing and services sectors, Bangalore seems to have taken a bigger hit in hiring since July 2008 than the other cities.

Hiring in the city in July 2009 was 40.5 per cent lower than a year ago, indicating that the global recession impacted it more than the other IT hubs.

A fall in hiring was noticed across all cities, with Delhi being the best off.

Its hiring in July 2009 was 19.2 per cent lower than in July 2008.

In Kolkata, hiring was 25 per cent lower.

In the other cities, the fall in hiring is 33-36 per cent.

"The IT companies including those headquartered in Bangalore are hiring but the vacancies are in the other cities," said Sumeet Singh, National Head, Marketing and Communications, Info Edge, the group company that owns portals such as Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com and 99acres.com.

One of the key reasons why Bangalore has not seen an uptake in hiring is that most of the IT companies have their largest centres in the city and hence they would want their centres in other locations to grow, said Sunil Goel, Professional Leader, GlobalHunt, a recruitment firm.

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The Bangalore centre largely caters to the vendors' global business and since the global market has still not picked up, hiring has been muted in the Bangalore centres, he added.