There has been a significant rebound in hiring following the easing of lockdown restrictions and, between early-April to end-June recruitment in India has increased by 35 percentage points, says a report.

According to LinkedIn’s latest ‘Labour Market Update’, a monthly update on hiring trends and insights, though there has been a significant hiring rebound, the pace of these gains is expected to slow down given the continued economic uncertainty.

As per the data, in India, hiring declines reached a low of (-) 50 per cent year-on-year in April, before starting to slowly recover. The hiring sentiment stood at (-) 15 per cent year-on-year as of the end of June.

“As risks of second-wave of infections emerge, some states have imposed lockdown measures again. Given this uncertainty, the recovery is expected to remain fairly flat in the coming weeks,” it said.

Data also suggested that the gap between hires for males and females has narrowed from about 40 percentage points in February to around 30 percentage points in June.

The competition for jobs has also doubled compared to 6 months ago, with the average number of applications per job posted on LinkedIn increasing from around 90 in January 2020, to 180 in June 2020.

The Labour Market Update also highlighted the roles that are in demand at present and are expected to remain relevant in the near future. The top five in-demand jobs are Software Engineer, Business Development Manager, Sales Manager, Business Analyst and Content Writer.

“These roles have the greatest number of job openings on LinkedIn, have seen steady growth over the past four years, pay a liveable wage, and require skills that can be learned online,” it said.

The top five in-demand skills are JavaScript, SQL, sales management, team leadership and recruiting.

LinkedIn’s ‘Labour Market Update’ is a monthly update on hiring trends and insights based on LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, a digital representation of the Indian economy and insights from the graph provide real-time information on trends that are emerging in the labour market.