Bengaluru, Apr 19 (IANS): With economic activity showing impressive recovery from Covid's grip, hiring demand witnessed a 6 per cent year-on-year growth in the month of March 2022, according to a report.

The Monster Employment Index (MEI) showed online recruitment activity exceeded the year-ago level in 11 out of the 13 cities monitored by the index. All metros registered a double-digit growth on an annual basis.

Mumbai (up 21 per cent) continued to be the biggest job market, closely followed by Coimbatore (up 20 per cent), and Chennai and Hyderabad (up 16 per cent each).

E-recruitment activity in Bengaluru (up 15 per cent) charted a positive trend but weakened from previous months. While Pune recorded 12 per cent growth, Kolkata and Delhi-NCR registered a growth of 13 per cent each.

The hiring demand in March 2022 was driven by banking/financial services and insurance which showed remarkable improvement (up 37 per cent) followed by telecom/ISP (up 17 per cent) and production and manufacturing (up 16 per cent).

In addition, jobs also rebounded for hospitality and travel (up 11 per cent) personnel after a long time and experienced significantly improved demand levels annually.

However, engineering, cement, construction, and iron/steel (down 20 per cent) continued to witness a year-on-year decline in the series since April 2020, registering the sharpest deceleration among sectors.

The pace of the growth moderated further for the media and entertainment (down 16 per cent) and FMCG, food and packaged food (down 13 per cent) industry and slid down in March 2022 annually, according to MEI data.

"Two years into the pandemic, it is heartening to see that the Indian economy has overcome setbacks and challenges with hiring momentum exceeding pre-Covid levels by 6 per cent this year compared to 2020," said Sekhar Garisa, CEO - Monster.com, in a statement.

"Sectors such as banking and telecom have undoubtedly contributed to the overall revitalisation of employment generation in the country. It is also encouraging to see a substantial rise in business activity across tier-II cities given that smaller cities have historically feathered the adverse effects of the pandemic crisis with a surplus talent pool to boot," he added.

In terms of tech jobs, the emergence of Metaverse and its potential applications has created a lot of career opportunities in new skill areas.

While brands and enterprises continue to value creativity and human-centred design with tech-enabled applications, job roles such as design architects, software designers, system validation engineers, 3D artists, AR/VR maintenance and support, and design/graphics engineer are expected to be in high demand in the coming months.

"As India Inc. continues to adopt the hybrid and back-to-office work models, we hope to see a continued recovery and a step forward to normalcy in the coming months,"Garisa said.

The MEI is based on a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities culled from a large, representative selection of online career outlets. The period considered for the MEI data is March 1-31.