In the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, India saw an unprecedented impact on migrant labour and overall jobs. As the fear of another lockdown haunts the second wave surge, CNBC-TV18 tries to assess its impact on jobs with N Ravi Vishwanath, Group CFO at Quess Corp, and Rituparna Chakraborty, Co-founder & Executive VP at Teamlease.

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Chakraborty said, “What we are noticing is clearly employers are far better prepared and there is less panic, there are less kneejerk reactions. We must remind ourselves that thanks to the pandemic most organisations have had already done a lot of rationalisation because of which they were operating with very lean staff in any case. We did see hiring pick-up from September onwards, aided by the festive season.”

Talking specifically about Maharashtra, she said, “I don’t think the intent to hire has reduced but because of the restrictions that are being announced and especially in Maharashtra we are seeing organisations are choosing to right now put some of the hirings on hold. They want to watch out what it means, how it is going to affect mobility, operations, what is the nature of retractions so it so primarily something that we are noticing coming out of Maharashtra."

N Ravi said, “I don’t think hiring has been impacted in any way for us in the sense that we are back to where we left off last year. We have gone back to pre-COVID levels in terms of the general staffing headcount. It only shows that from Q2, Q3 and Q4 I think we have done reasonably well and demand has kind of picked up in Q4 especially. As of last week, the demand continued to be strong but this week is another story, we don’t know how it is going to play out.”

For the full interview, watch the accompanying video.

(Edited by : Priyanka Rathi)

First Published:Apr 12, 2021 12:07 PM IST