With signs of a revival in the global technology sector, several major players in the country?s $50-billion software export industry are firming up larger hiring plans.
The first announcement was made by the country?s largest software services firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which on Wednesday said it plans to hire 30,000 people in 2010-11. The company, which generally doesn?t provide guidance, said that the plans are based on deals in the pipeline, which are looking up.
?The US has been the fastest to recover. Unlike last year, large deals are back in the market and even if clients don?t increase their budgets substantially, our addressable pie of the market will increase,? TCS CEO & MD N Chandrasekaran said on the sidelines of the Nasscom India Leadership Forum. He added that 70% of the new hires would be fresh graduates.
Though the country?s second largest IT firm, Infosys Technologies, has so far not made any announcement regarding its hiring plans for next fiscal, the signals are positive. It recently increased its hiring plans to 24,000 people this fiscal from the earlier 20,000.
For its part, the country?s third largest IT firm, Wipro Technologies, is realigning its business models so that it can hire smarter rather than larger.
Wipro IT executive director & joint CEO Girish Paranjpe told FE: ?Our hiring is going to be much tighter than the big employment numbers our peers are talking about. We can have a much leaner supply chain without compromising on fulfilment.? However, Paranjpe was confident about the overall market situation, stating that his company would add 7,500 fresh graduates over the next two quarters. ?Post the recession, we realised that high bench strength is not a great thing. What is a more relevant is a smart bench of people that can be quickly deployed. Last quarter, we have displayed that we can increase our utilisation levels even while there is high volume growth,? he said.
The broader consensus among IT players is that next fiscal is expected to be good both in terms of topline and bottomline growth. ?There was a lot of pent-up demand in the market as clients had not completely shelved their projects and had only put them on the backburner. A lot of those projects are being restarted now. Moreover, first time outsourcers are coming into the fray,? said Gartner India regional research head and vice-president Partha Iyengar.
The fact that clients are increasingly looking at cost efficiencies is also driving them to offshore more. R Chandrashekharan, president & MD at Nasdaq-listed Cognizant, which has two-thirds of its workforce in India, said there is a clear uptick in demand and that clients are asking for more offshoring, not just for the cost arbitrage, but also from the standpoint of pure talent availability.