Ecom, logistics firms ramp up hiring as festive demand gathers momentum | Industry News
With the festival season around the corner, ecommerce (ecom), quick-commerce (qcom), and logistics firms are ramping up hiring to meet a longer demand period. This year, the festival shopping season got an early start in August, with Raksha Bandhan falling on Friday (August 28), giving consumers a long weekend and adding to the festive mood. The season is expected to continue through Diwali and into the winter wedding season.
Among ecom platforms, Meesho is looking to create one of the largest pools of seasonal job opportunities. The company aims to enable more than 1 million jobs, including nearly 650,000 across its seller network and around 375,000 across the logistics ecosystem. It added that nearly 130,000 sellers are expected to hire seasonal workers across packaging, manufacturing, production, warehousing, and inventory management.
“The festival season is an important period for businesses across our ecosystem to scale up and prepare for increased demand. Meesho’s logistics platform Valmo, along with our third-party logistics partners, will also scale capacity, creating seasonal roles across delivery, sortation, delivery centre operations, and supervisory functions,” said a spokesperson for the company.
Similar to Meesho, ecom giant Amazon said it has created more than 160,000 seasonal work opportunities across its pan-Indian operations network to support its businesses, including qcom vertical Amazon Now. The new hiring opportunities, which include direct and indirect work opportunities across 400 cities, are in picking, packing, shipping, and delivery roles.
Abhinav Singh, vice-president of operations for Amazon India, Asia-Pacific, West Asia, Africa, and Türkiye, said, “The expanded workforce will help us strengthen our fulfilment and logistics capabilities and ensure we can handle the festival season seamlessly. Many of these associates continue their journey with Amazon beyond the festival period, while several others return year after year to work with us.”
Both Amazon and Meesho said a large number of opportunities are in non-metro cities.
Speaking of the hiring momentum in such cities, Kartik Narayan, chief executive officer (CEO) of job marketplace Apna, said opportunities in Tier-II and Tier-III cities now account for nearly 55 per cent of gig jobs on the platform, up from about 39 per cent two years ago. “The growth is also much more distributed geographically. Tier-II and Tier-III cities are up around 110 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y), compared with about 86 per cent in metros. Demand is strongest in last-mile delivery and fulfilment. Ecom and parcel delivery remain the largest categories in smaller cities, while qcom is growing the fastest, with postings up more than 600 per cent Y-o-Y,” Narayan added.
According to data from TeamLease Services, festival season temporary hiring this year is expected to rise 15-20 per cent over last year. Balasubramanian A, senior vice-president at the company, said employers are increasingly hiring for specialised profiles such as qcom dark-store associates, inventory and fulfilment coordinators, and quality-check and returns-management executives. “This marks a shift from the earlier ‘hiring scramble’ model to more precision-led workforce planning, where speed, productivity, and customer experience are being prioritised alongside sheer headcount.”
One such firm hiring for specialised roles is drone-based logistics platform Skye Air. Ankit Kumar, founder and CEO of the firm, said the company expects to add close to 200 people this festival season. “The shape of hiring says a lot about where the industry is headed. Around 150 of these are pilot roles, largely Directorate General of Civil Aviation-certified remote pilots and drone technicians deployed across Himachal Pradesh and Assam, where terrain and last-mile access make drone delivery not just faster but often the only practical option. The remaining roles are in hub operations, flight operations, and compliance.”
Likewise, Sarthak Elwadhi, cofounder of logistics firm TrucksUp, said that while the company has around 900 full-time staff members, it expects to increase its on-roll staff by 20 per cent. “The focus on hiring is on product engineering, data science, innovation in deeptech, and core operations.”
On the gig side, the company currently has around 5,000 partners and aims to triple the count over the next two years.
Another logistics platform, Blue Dart, said that it expects to create around 3,000 front-end operations roles across its network. Beena Mathen Jacob, chief human resources officer at the firm, said, “Festival-season hiring is expected to be 7-8 per cent higher than last year, reflecting continued growth in ecom-led demand and higher network throughput requirements. These opportunities will primarily be in delivery operations, hub and gateway handling, sorting, and last-mile logistics to support the anticipated increase in shipment volumes.”
