The hiring sentiment in India reflected a resilience to the COVID third wave as the hiring activity saw a healthy 41 per cent (on-year) growth in January, a report showed on Tuesday. The upswing of hiring activity was observed in multiple sectors with IT-software, retail and telecom leading the charts, according to Naukri JobSpeak index.

"While we saw spurts of growth during the year 2021, the first month of this year has kicked off with a bang as industries across India are gearing up for growth and getting past the previous year," said Pawan Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Naukri.com.

Other sectors that observed an uptick in hiring trend compared with last year are pharma (29 per cent), medical/healthcare (10 per cent), oil and gas/power (8 per cent), insurance (8 per cent), FMCG (7 per cent), and manufacturing (2 per cent).

Bengaluru (+79 per cent), Hyderabad (+66 per cent), and Pune (+63 per cent) recorded the highest growth in January.

Among the non-metros, Ahmedabad (+50 per cent) witnessed highest growth in January, followed by Coimbatore (+43 per cent), Kochi (+27 per cent), Vadodara (+12 per cent) and Jaipur (+8 per cent).

Hiring across all experience bands was positive in January 2022 when compared with January with demand for senior professionals belonging to the 8-12 yrs (+48 per cent) experience bracket receiving maximum traction.

Other metro cities like Mumbai (+58 per cent), Chennai (+54 per cent), Kolkata (41 per cent), and Delhi/NCR (+35 per cent) also witnessed a spike in the hiring trajectory.