iWorld
Telecom to be among 2017’s top employment generators; rise in women pro predicted
MUMBAI: The Year 2017 is bringing good news for job seekers, with an expected 10-15 per cent rise in hiring activity in 2017 as reported by over 2000 employers across India Inc. according to a private survey. This points towards a cheerful year for the hiring industry, as employers’ expectations are greater than what they were last year.
In the survey last year (2015-16), employers had anticipated a lower 5-10 per cent rise in hiring while now they are upbeat about seeing a 10-15 per cent rise in 2017. “There is a clear paradigm shift in the Indian economy, with the support of the government’s efforts and focus on IT, entrepreneurship and manufacturing, India Inc. is steering itself for strong growth that is seen to be impacting job growth and employment in the country next year,” says Times Business Solutions head of strategy Nilanjan Roy.
In the TimesJobs survey 2016-17, 30 per cent organisations felt the IT and telecom sectors will hire the biggest numbers, 20 per cent said the healthcare sector and 15 per cent said that manufacturing will be the top employment generator. Another 15 per cent voted for automobile and 10 per cent for infrastructure and retail sectors.
The focus on gender diversity will also continue to take shape in 2017, as highlighted by India Inc. in the 2016-17 study. Over 70 per cent organisations plan to increase the ratio of women in their workforce. This is a significant 10 per cent rise in employer expectations as compared to that in 2016, showing a heightened awareness of the gender diversity challenge faced by India Inc. About 60 per cent employers foresee a higher demand for women professionals at the middle level positions, 20 per cent see maximum hires at the entry level while another 20 percent say they will hire women professional for CXO level leadership roles in 2017.
Nearly 25% of organisations voted that IT would be the most sought after profile followed by another 20 per cent organizations that feel the demand for sales, business development professionals and research and development profiles will rise considerably in 2017. About 15 per cent organisations said that they expect marketing and advertising professionals to see maximum demand in 2017.
The most optimistic hiring expectations are for middle-level professionals, according to the survey 2016-17. The study reveals professionals with 5-10 years of experience will see the maximum demand across sectors. Nearly 30 per cent of the organisations surveyed stated mid-level managers with 5-10 years of experience would be most sought in 2017. About 20 per cent employers see greater demand for young professionals with less than 2 years of experience in 2017 while 15 per cent said experienced professionals with 10-20 years of experience will be most in demand.
While positive hiring activity is being reported in Tier I cities and state capitals, the major metros will continue to be the top job hubs in 2017 according to the survey. Nearly 45 per cent organisations said job opportunities will be maximum in metro cities, including, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai while 40 per cent see a rise in employment opportunities in Tier I locations. Overall, the survey 2016-17 reports the second and fourth-quarters of 2017 as the hottest for hiring in India Inc.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
