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What the Job Market in India Looks Like Right Now

By JobsEye Team29 September 20263 min read

Hiring in India is up 14 percent on a year ago, AI and ML roles are up 31 percent, and each application is half as likely to get an interview as in 2021. The numbers behind the market in September 2026.

The job market in India is growing, and it is harder to get noticed in. Both are true at once, and the numbers show why.

Hiring is up

Naukri's JobSpeak index for August 2026, released on 8 September, put white-collar hiring 14 percent above August 2025: the index stood at 3,028 against 2,664 a year earlier. It was a step down from July's 3,227, which is normal month to month, but the yearly comparison is one of the strongest of 2026. July's reading was 5 percent up on the year.

The growth in August was broad:

• By field: AI and ML roles rose 31 percent, IT and information security 32 percent. Outside technology, auto rose 19 percent, healthcare 16, retail 15 and accounting and finance 14.
• By experience: hiring for people with up to three years rose 15 percent, and every experience band grew, from 10 percent (4 to 7 years) to 18 percent (13 to 15 years).
• By city: Hyderabad grew 23 percent, Kolkata 22, Chennai 20, Pune and Bengaluru 14, Delhi NCR 10 and Mumbai 7.

Getting an interview is harder

Growth in openings has not made it easier to be picked. Ashby's 2026 Talent Trends data, covering 109 million applications, shows employers received 291 applications for every hire in the first quarter of 2026, up from about 100 in 2021. The share of applications that led to an interview fell from 7 to 8 percent in 2021 to between 3.6 and 4.7 percent.

Ashby's data is global, not Indian, but the mechanism is the same everywhere: applying online has become easy, so each role gets far more applications, and the screen at the start is where most of them stop.

What the roles look like on the ground

On 29 September 2026 the JobsEye index, read straight from employers' career pages, held 30,275 open on-site and hybrid roles in India. 7,055 of them had appeared in the previous seven days. Bengaluru had the most (10,850), followed by Hyderabad (3,799), Delhi NCR (3,526), Mumbai (3,109) and Pune (3,010).

Roles also close quickly. A listing that is still visible on a job board weeks later may have been filled or withdrawn long ago. Checking that a role is still open on the company's own page before you spend time on it is one of the cheapest ways to save effort.

What this means for your search

• There are more roles to go after, especially in AI and ML, healthcare, auto, finance and the fast-growing southern cities.
• Each application counts for less on its own, so volume matters more than it did five years ago.
• Volume without fit does not help. A poor match stays a poor match however many times it is sent. Target the roles you fit and tailor each application.
• Apply while a role is new, before it has collected hundreds of other applications.

JobsEye is built for this market: it reads employers' own career pages, checks roles are still open, ranks them against your resume and applies on the company's own form, so sending more applications does not mean doing more form filling. See what is open for you.

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