Managing to ride out the impacts of demonetisation, the revision in H-1B regulations and the implementation of GST, hiring activity in 2018 is expected to surge, with several companies looking to recruit in higher numbers this year, with a specific intention to counter the threat from start-ups, according to a survey.

While the engineering, infrastructure, healthcare, retail and autombile sectors will see a rise in hiring, the IT sector is set to register maximum volume of hiring this year, showed a survey by online recruitment and career solutions portal Wisdomjobs.com.

The threat from start-ups is evident in the hiring activity. “Start-ups, especially in the technology and IT sectors are competing with corporates to hire top-notch talent,” Ajay Kolla, founder and CEO, Wisdomjobs.com, told BusinessLine .

The number of start-ups that hire from premier institutions such as IITs and IIMs are seeing an increase year on year, he added.

However, when it comes to lateral hiring, “the same start-ups are willing to offer candidates remuneration and benefits on par or better than those offered by corporates. Most companies are competing for the same talent.”

Maintaining that the talent pool “that can work on new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and advanced data analytics is still relatively small,” Kolla admits that the start-ups’ gain is the corporates’ loss in this aspect.

“Corporates are countering this threat by adapting their hiring and HR policies, especially benefits like stock options and profit-sharing, to make them more attractive to potential candidates.”

Surveying 140 companies and more than 350 recruiters in 10 sectors such as IT, retail, hospitality, FMCG, healthcare and automobiles, to understand their hiring intentions, Wisdomjobs’ ‘Hiring Pattern and Compensation Analysis 2018’ report showed that companies will try hard to retain existing talent, and will invest more on employee skill development, upskilling, and on training.

Several companies are upskilling their workforces by hiring laterally while others are focussing on fresh talents and training them to acquire new, in-demand skills.

While 58 per cent of companies surveyed said they plan to invest up to 10 per cent of their HR budgets on skill development and training of existing employees, nearly 10 per cent said they plan on investing more than 20 per cent towards the same.

Around 60 per cent of the companies surveyed said they plan to hire in significant numbers this year, while 52 per cent said they will hire majorly from metro cities, and tier I towns.

Millennial hiring

Millennial hiring is expected to proceed aggressively, said Kolla, with the creation of a multitude of openings for new-age technologies in the IT and technology sectors. Manufacturing, ITeS, transport and hospitality sectors which saw a fall in hiring in 2017, are also expected to make a partial recovery this year.

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