Naukri.com's JobSpeak Index for September 2026, published by Info Edge in early October, paints a market that's best described as flat on the surface and sharply divided underneath. The headline index reached 3,053, up just 2% from 3,002 a year earlier — a modest number that masks very different stories depending on which sector or city you look at.
A 2% year-on-year rise is close to stagnant by the standards of India's recent hiring cycles. August, by comparison, had shown 14% growth, which Naukri partly attributed to a timing shift in the festive hiring period between the two years. Info Edge CEO Hitesh Oberoi described the current market as "steady, but more selective," with demand concentrating around specialised skills and experienced professionals rather than broad-based hiring.
Postings for AI and machine learning roles rose 20% year-on-year — easily the strongest growth of any major sector tracked in the index. Auto followed at 11% growth. By contrast, IT and software services postings fell 4%, pharma and biotech declined 4%, FMCG dropped 4%, and education postings fell a steep 18%. The pattern reinforces a trend that's shown up consistently through the year: broad tech recruitment is cooling even as demand for AI-specific skills keeps climbing within it.
Fresher hiring grew just 1% year-on-year — barely moving — while experienced bands fared noticeably better. Professionals with 8 to 12 years of experience saw postings grow 5%, and the 13-to-16-year band grew 7%. That's a reversal of the usual assumption that AI adoption mainly threatens junior roles; right now, it's translating into more demand for experienced hands who can apply AI tools to existing workflows, while entry-level hiring stays largely flat.
Hyderabad posted the strongest city-level growth at 9%, while both Delhi NCR and Mumbai saw postings fall 6% year-on-year. That's consistent with a broader pattern of AI and GCC-linked hiring spreading to cities beyond the traditional Bengaluru-Delhi-Mumbai axis.
If you're in a generalist IT or software services role, the data suggests the market genuinely has gotten tougher this month, not just anecdotally — postings in that bucket are down, not flat. The clearest lever available to most job seekers right now is adjacent AI/ML skill-building: even a working, demonstrable familiarity with applying AI tools inside your existing domain (finance, healthcare, auto, operations) puts you closer to the one segment of the market that's still growing at 20% a year. If you're early in your career, don't read the flat fresher numbers as a verdict on you personally — it reflects employers being more selective across the board, which makes a sharp, specific resume and a portfolio of real project work more valuable than volume applications.