Last Festive Season’s Hiring Surge Was 25%. This One’s Set Up to Be Bigger.

India’s last festive season was a hiring surge by any measure. Adecco India’s festive hiring report clocked gig and temporary job growth at 25% over the prior year, with logistics and last-mile delivery roles leading at 35-40% growth and retail and e-commerce close behind at 28% — and the same report forecast another 18-20% year-on-year growth heading into the next cycle. Every one of those numbers gets read as a sourcing win in a July planning meeting. It’s actually a screening deadline, and most hiring teams don’t notice until the applications are already sitting in an inbox nobody can get through before the festive rush hits.

The compression nobody puts on the calendar

Festive hiring doesn’t behave like a normal recruiting cycle. A quick-commerce operator or logistics company can see the demand curve coming months out, but the actual hiring still has to land inside a fixed window that ends before the first big sale event, not whenever the pipeline gets around to it. Compress the timeline and stretch the volume at the same time, and you get exactly the shape of problem campus recruiters know well: a flood of applications that all need a decision inside a window too short for anyone to have a real conversation with each one.

Tier II and III cities are where this compression bites hardest. Adecco’s data showed festive hiring growing 21-25% year-on-year in cities like Lucknow, Jaipur, Coimbatore, and Nagpur — outpacing metro growth — which means the volume increase is landing where hiring teams are typically thinnest, not where they’re best staffed.

This is the same math as campus hiring, just on a shorter clock

Indian campus recruiters figured this out the hard way years ago: once an opening draws thousands of applicants in a matter of days, no team can talk to each one, and the honest fix isn’t more recruiters — it’s a screening conversation that runs at whatever pace the applications arrive. That’s how a single evening drive got through 3,000 candidates in about two hours instead of stretching across weeks. The difference with festive hiring is the runway. A campus drive gets planned across a semester. A festive delivery-staff ramp gets whatever’s left between the July planning meeting and the first big sale event, and a meaningful chunk of that runway disappears before job postings even go live.

The honest difference: festive roles skew toward things a resume genuinely can’t tell you — comfort with a delivery app under time pressure, willingness to work the exact shift pattern peak season demands, basic reliability signals — not the communication depth you’d screen for in a customer-facing or campus IT role. A screening layer built for campus hiring doesn’t transplant unchanged. What transfers is the mechanism: a structured conversation, not a form, run at the pace applications actually arrive.

What breaks when the screening plan is an afterthought

The failure mode isn’t that festive roles go unfilled. Warehouses and delivery fleets in high season almost always end up staffed — through overtime pay, third-party staffing agencies, or lowering the bar on who gets waved through. What breaks quietly is quality: teams under a hard deadline default to first-applicant-first-hired or thin proxies like distance from the hub, because those are fast to check, not because they predict who’ll actually show up reliably through the peak. That shows up later as no-shows on day one of training, or attrition mid-surge when the job turns out to not match what the candidate expected.

Compensation data backs up how much pressure was already in the system last season: entry-level festive pay rose 12-15% year-on-year and up to 22% for experienced roles, according to the same Adecco report. Teams are already paying more to compete for the same pool. Spending that premium on candidates who were never going to work out is the expensive version of the same mistake campus recruiters used to make screening by resume keywords.

The take

Festive hiring gets planned as a sourcing problem every year, on a calendar that has room for postings, interviews, and onboarding, but no explicit line item for “how do we actually talk to a bigger applicant pool in the same fixed window.” Sourcing was never the constraint. The constraint is deciding, at speed, who’s reliable enough to hand a delivery bag or a warehouse shift to, and that decision gets worse the faster the volume outpaces the team’s capacity to look closely.

If your festive-season hiring plan has a sourcing number but no screening plan for the volume behind it, see what a rejection-first screen looks like at your scale before the postings go live.

Source: Festive hiring in India rises 17% as gig, temporary jobs surge — Adecco India report via IBEF