The Search for Digital Talent: India Takes the Lead 

Key Takeaways

1. 1

   31% of all LinkedIn supply chain job postings in India require digital skills of prospective employees, the most of any country. Jobs in India are the most likely to require analytics (21% of all supply chain roles) as well as AI/ML (12%) and automation (9%) skills.

2. 2

   Amazon is the top LinkedIn recruiter for supply chain positions from India among our B2C set, hiring five times as many as the company recruiting the second most, PepsiCo.

A Pioneer in Emerging Tech Talent 

Supply chain organizations are struggling to build out their own tech talent, and with digital skills listed as a requirement in only 8% of all supply chain job postings in the UK, B2C companies have been forced to expand their searches to the full global market to meet their talent needs. India has emerged as an early leader in this space, having invested heavily in infrastructure, innovation, and, most strikingly, skills, with the goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2025. 

A Zero100 analysis of 589,000 supply chain job descriptions worldwide revealed that hiring requirements in India are the most technically sophisticated. 31% of all supply chain roles in India require digital skills, as compared to an average of 14% for other top hiring destinations. In a recent Signal post, Zero100 noted that new hires in India are 35 times more likely to be required to have Python skills when starting a new job than in North America and 27 times more likely to be proficient in Python than they are in Europe. The Zero100 team’s broader investigation into 100 leading B2C brands provided further evidence of India’s superior tech capabilities, revealing that 21% of all supply chain roles and two-thirds of digital roles in India require analytics skills. Furthermore, 38% of digital roles require AI/ML skills and 30% of digital roles require automation skills – the highest rates of any country with significant supply chain hiring on LinkedIn. Analytics skills have been table stakes in India job postings for some time, while AI/ML skills have continued to trend upward in 2023. Meanwhile, in the US, analytics skills, mentioned in around 3% of job postings, have plateaued, and AI/ML skills have only seen a slight increase since March 2023.  

Many companies are pursuing the abundance of technically proficient candidates in India, and Amazon is leading the way. The top LinkedIn recruiter for supply chain positions from India among our B2C set, Amazon is hiring five times as many candidates as PepsiCo, the company recruiting the second most. The talent gap is also an indication that roles elsewhere are not nearly digital enough. To combat this, Walmart are taking a more targeted hiring approach, opting to include a digital skill requirement in two-thirds of their postings rather than outsourcing talent. 

Zero100 Recommendation 

To address the talent gap, digital-forward supply chain organizations should enhance their job descriptions to focus on technical skills, and/or look globally, with a particular eye on India for proficiency in Python and/or SQL, AI/ML, and robotics. 

To see a different data cut or to dig deeper into this topic, reach out to our Head of Research Analytics, Cody Stack, at Cody.Stack@zero100.com.

Methodology 

Zero100’s proprietary data and analytics are a combined effort between our data scientists and research analysts. We provide data-first insights matched with our own research-backed points of view and bring this analysis to life via real-world case examples being led by supply chain practitioners today.   

For this study, we looked at 2.4 million LinkedIn job posts from 100 B2C companies. Our analysis categorizes listings based on mentions of specific digital skills within job titles and descriptions.