Faced with pressure from US senators, Indian IT companies are scouting for local talent in the US in the field of consulting services and sales and marketing. This has pushed up the percentage of local employees in the total staff strength significantly to 11-12% from 2%-3% a few years back.
Viral Thakker, director, sourcing advisory services, KPMG, said, “Indian IT companies, which have traditionally been viewed as IT vendors, now want to climb the ladder to position themselves as high value-added business consultants.”
Currently, revenues from consulting services is about 3%-4% for the Indian IT industry. Hiren Mehta, an analyst at Angel Broking, said, “When it comes to high-end consulting, Indian IT companies charge as high as $150-$200 per hour. So, there is a huge scope in the field.”
Companies are also increasingly recruiting graduates from US universities for application development and management, which is the back-end work for consulting.
TCS recently announced plans to employ 1,000 people and Wipro is recruiting about 500 graduates each for three new centres in the US.
Mohandas Pai, board member and director HR, Infosys, said, “About 11%-12% of our employees based in the US are locals and we are looking at local employees who are experts in consulting.”
Indian companies have been avoiding employing locals as the cost was three times more than the cost of an employee flying down from India. But costs to hire locals have significantly come down due to recession fears. Experts in the industry say that companies are now paying $40,000 for locals against $65,000 for an Indian for a similar project.