Info Edge is on the radar after the August JobSpeak Index saw a 90 percent rise year on year. The hiring in August this year surpassed even the pre-pandemic levels, that is August 2019 by 24 percent.

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Hitesh Oberoi, CEO & MD, Info Edge, said, “In the last few quarters, the job market, especially for engineers has not been of the type one has seen in maybe the last two decades. It's a super-hot market with attrition rates and most companies are going through the roof, talent is impossible to hire. It's very hard for companies to add headcount at this point in time, especially in engineering, digital, and IT services as well.”

“It is a rock-solid market, and it is slowly spreading now to the non-IT sectors as well. So, it started with the IT market, which has been hot for the last three quarters but now, it's only beginning to spread to the other sectors as well, as the Indian economy starts to recover, “said Oberoi.

Info Edge Limited is a pure-play internet company that runs an online job portal Naukri.com, a matrimony website Jeevansathi.com, a real estate classifieds platform 99acres.com and an educational website Shiksha.com.

According to Oberoi, “In real estate also for the first time after many years, people are looking for bigger homes, home loan rates are falling. So, even real estate is beginning to look up in pockets, and prices are going up for the first time in a long time in many parts of the country. Weddings on the other hand actually have been slow for the last few months because of the second wave of COVID, which left a deep impact on the psyche of many families and people. But even there, one is hopeful that after the Navratri and Diwali season, weddings will also bounce back strongly.”

He further said, “At least in tech, engineering, software, IT, digital start-ups, these sectors are red hot and talent is hard to get, salaries are going through the roof and it is not uncommon for people to get 30-40 percent jumps. There is a limited pool of talent, every company wants to go digital and companies have brought forward their plans by five years, seven years, companies that were hoping to get 30-40-50 percent of their business to come from digital in the next five years are now hoping that 70 percent of their business will be digital in the next two years. That is a mega change in the mindset of how companies are thinking and that's leading to a surge in demand for IT. Now if they combine this with the fact that there are remote working opportunities, people are able to get jobs not just in India but even overseas and there is this massive surge right now, you cannot overnight produce a lot of engineers, you can't overnight upskill them and so unless the demand is hit for some reason, the situation will continue to be like this for the next few quarters as well.”

When asked while Info Edge was the original incubator how come they were not looking at the blue-collar market, because Apna (an app for blue-collar jobs in India) has been grabbing headlines, Oberoi said, “The start-up market is also red hot and companies are now becoming unicorns in two to three years, companies are raising in unison around $80 million-$100 million. These are unheard numbers but many of these companies actually don't have revenues, it's just that they have fancy valuations right now. One must not forget that unicorns are not a one-way street, you could be a unicorn for today, you may not remain a unicorn tomorrow, ultimately companies have to build a strong business to get customer money or investor money.”

“We continue to be aggressive in the job space, we have acquired at least three companies in the last 18 months or so. One in the talent assessment space, one in the premium talent, jobs, one in the recruitment sort of management space called Zwayam. We are building our own blue-collar platform inside the company – JobHai and we are test marketing right now in the NCR region and if the results are good, we will take it nationally as well.

There is a lot of action and valuations in the market but we continue to focus on building our business and doing what we can for our customers,” he mentioned.

For the full interview, watch the video

(Edited by : Dipika Ghosh)