E-commerce sector expected to create 500,000 jobs by Diwali: Report

The demand for gig workers is, however, not restricted to tier-1 locations. Tier 2 and tier 3 cities have seen an increase of 40 per cent, with a higher demand for delivery workers.

Aryaman Gupta reports.

With the festival sales in full swing, e-commerce firms are ramping up hiring to meet the increasing consumer demand.

Close to 300,000 new jobs have been created in the sector so far and over 500,000 more jobs are expected to be added till Diwali, according to a report by TeamLease.

The demand for gig workers is, however, not restricted to tier-1 cities. Tier-2 and tier-3 cities have seen an increase of 40 per cent, with a higher demand for delivery workers, according to a TeamLease report.

“Hiring in the logistics domain has also increased as e-commerce companies are trying to crunch their delivery time.

"In fact, the fast-growing third party logistics segment is expected to add 800,000 jobs by December 2022,” said Ajoy Thomas, vice-president and business head (retail, e-commerce, logistics and transportation) at TeamLease.

“Quick-commerce, QSRs, retail stores, FMCG, and FOS (foots-on-the-street) salesmen are the most in-demand roles other than delivery executives,” he added.

Currently, India is considered a low-margin market where 300,000-400,000 people work as delivery executives.

E-commerce companies are, hence, looking for ways to tackle management costs of their delivery fleets.

For start-ups, 50 per cent of their expenses come from managing the biker fleet, the report revealed.

Taskmo, a gig platform with over 750,000 registered workers, said that it has witnessed a 50-70 per cent surge in seasonal hiring from e-commerce platforms, especially since July, due to the festival season.

The platform said it was completing around 500,000-600,000 tasks per month, up from 300,000 in May.

“We have witnessed around 8x to 10x increase in tasks completed during the last two weeks,” said Prashant Janadri, co-founder of Taskmo. “We have onboarded around 4x more gig workers than mandated to meet the e-commerce demand, with significant participation coming from tier-2 and tier-3 cities,” he added.

“To meet Diwali demand, we have been acquiring a lot more taskers for the past two months,” he added.

According to logistics unicorn Ecom Express, there has been a surge in demand for delivery talent which has grown by 35 per cent over the previous year.

“We can see an increase in demand for delivery personnel. For the peak season rush, Ecom Express is hiring seasonal staff and onboarding gig workers, seeing a 35 per cent jump from last year.

"About 60-65 per cent of the hiring will take place in tier-3 and 4 cities and remote parts of the country,” said Ashish Sikka, chief strategy officer of Ecom Express.

Jobs and professional networking platform Apna.co has also seen an increase in demand for e-commerce gig workers due to the festival season.

“In the last few months, we have seen an uptick in the demand for gig workers on our platform.

"We have recorded a 100 per cent increase in job posts for roles such as delivery partners during this time period (July-September),” said Manas Singh, chief business officer at Apna.co.