Only 1 in 4 festive season hires move into permanent roles: Experts

temporary staffing demand is expected to increase 15–20 percent year-on-year, translating into around 2.5–2.7 lakh temporary and gig jobs, compared with approximately 2.16 lakh last year, according to Deepesh Gupta, Director and Head of General Staffing, Adecco India.

Frontline roles lead the festive hiring rush

The strongest hiring is concentrated around roles directly linked to fulfilment, delivery and customer-facing operations. Adecco expects logistics and last-mile delivery hiring to increase by 30–35 percent, while organised retail and e-commerce hiring is projected to grow 25–28 percent.

“Delivery executives, warehouse associates, picker-packers, sortation staff and fleet coordinators continue to anchor hiring across logistics and quick commerce,” Gupta said.

The hiring surge is also spreading beyond India’s largest cities. Kartik Narayan, CEO, Apna.co, said gig job postings on the platform have risen approximately 86 percent year-on-year in metros and 110 percent across Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities during the current pre-festive period.

Smaller cities now account for roughly 55 percent of gig postings on Apna, compared with about 39 percent two years ago. Demand is strongest for delivery, driver and logistics, service and repair, and field sales roles, alongside customer support, warehousing and back-office positions.

“Quick commerce is emerging as a particularly strong driver of this demand, with gig postings in smaller cities growing by more than 600 percent year-on-year,” Narayan said.

The shift suggests that festive hiring is increasingly following consumption patterns into smaller markets, creating frontline employment opportunities outside traditional metropolitan hubs.

Seasonal jobs, limited permanent conversion

While festive hiring is expanding, the transition from temporary to permanent employment remains far less pronounced.

Gupta said around 70–75 percent of festive-season hiring at Adecco is for temporary roles. However, only a “very small number” of these workers are converted into permanent positions, although their contracts may be extended beyond the festive season.

TeamLease Edtech’s Rooj offered a broader market estimate, suggesting that around one in four seasonal hires could potentially move into longer-term or permanent employment, although the actual conversion rate varies depending on sector, worker performance and post-festive demand.

“Festive hiring is increasingly valuable because it acts as an extended workplace assessment,” Rooj said. Employers can assess skill, reliability, readiness and performance under peak operating conditions before making longer-term decisions.

For sectors such as quick commerce, logistics, fulfilment and organised retail, some of the additional capacity created during the festive season may continue to be required after the peak period.

“The distinction between ‘seasonal’ and ‘permanent’ is therefore becoming less binary,” Narayan said. According to him, flexible hiring is increasingly becoming an additional workforce channel rather than simply a temporary solution for the festive period.

From festive manpower to a flexible workforce

The changing nature of festive hiring is also influencing how companies think about workforce planning. Instead of treating seasonal recruitment as a standalone annual exercise, employers are increasingly combining a permanent workforce with flexible talent that can be deployed when demand changes.

Rooj described this as a shift towards a “core-plus-flex workforce strategy”. TeamLease Edtech research shows that 69 percent of employers use flexi-staffing for seasonal or project requirements, while 60 percent cite cost optimisation and 48 percent skill shortages as key drivers.

“Seasonal hiring is increasingly becoming part of a broader core-plus-flex workforce strategy, rather than a short-term Diwali intervention,” Rooj said.

Employers are also hiring earlier, creating pre-assessed talent pools, digitising onboarding and using attendance bonuses, referral incentives, surge pay and productivity-linked rewards to improve readiness and retention.

Narayan said employers are increasingly planning around a permanent core workforce while using flexible talent during geographic expansion, new-store launches, seasonal demand and other short-term capacity requirements.

“The shift is therefore not necessarily from permanent employment to seasonal employment. Rather, we are seeing the emergence of a more blended workforce model,” he said, adding that permanent employees, flexible workers and increasingly AI-enabled capabilities can be deployed according to business demand.

The broader trend points to a changing role for temporary employment in India. Festive hiring is no longer only about filling short-term gaps in warehouses, stores and delivery networks. Increasingly, companies are using seasonal recruitment to build ready talent pools, test workers in live operating environments and add flexibility to workforce planning.