HR consultants see 30% rise in India’s e-retail hiring as sector grows fast

With foreign and domestic e-retail majors such as Amazon and Flipkart rapidly expanding their business in India, hiring is expected to grow by over 30 per cent in the sector this financial year, helping to create up to 50,000 jobs in the next two to three years, according to leading human resources consultancy Randstad India.

Hiring in e-retail space is likely to grow on the back of entry of domestic online start-ups and e-commerce multinationals venturing into Indian cyber marketplace, and the connected back-office operations. Flipkart of course last week completed a takeover deal with online fashion and lifestyle products seller Myntra.

Another HR firm, Unison International, says that hiring has been rather slow in the e-commerce space over last couple of years, but recruitments may grow rapidly now by 33 per cent over the previous year as various retail brands are also bringing in their business online, according to a PTI report.

As per findings of Jigsaw Academy, the e-commerce industry may create 15,000-50,000 jobs in the next three years for data analysts professionals alone.

"The companies are hiring aggressively and are also offering lucrative salaries to attract the right analytics talent," Jigsaw Academy CEO Gaurav Vohra said.

The sector recently saw one of the largest merger deals between homegrown e-commerce majors Myntra and Flipkart, while another domestic firm Snapdeal has also got new investors.

"The deal will only make Myntra's fashion business stronger and we will target more aggressive scale - to this end, our hiring will continue to be extremely aggressive but selective," Myntra VP-HR Pooja Gupta told PTI.

"We are working also to make HR more technology and analytics driven and that focus will continue," Gupta said.

According to global major Amazon, which is seen as one of the major competitors for the domestic e-commerce player, "the industry is growing rapidly and there is still a huge potential for growth".

"Likewise, we have grown exponentially over the last 11 months and will continue to see growth. Our hiring will continue to match this pace and grow accordingly," Amazon says.

HR consultancy MeraJob India's CEO Pallav Sinha said that the sector is "clearly poised for explosive growth".

"While private equity investments in e-commerce companies is one of the reasons for the expectation of this growth, the primary drivers are - proliferation of mobiles; development of digital payment platforms and social media usage.

"Hiring in e-Commerce is therefore poised for growth that could match the job creation rate in mobile telecom in early 2000's. Fiscal 2014-15 would be the tipping-point in this hiring growth in India," Sinha said.