Indian IT cos hire local talent in tier II US cities
NEW DELHI: Claude Snow got Bombayed in November 2009. The 40-year-old from Kensington, Connecticut, left HP-run Electronic Data Systems to join the BSE-listed business services firm Firstsource Solutions as a vice-president for sales in the US.
Cut to 2010. Mr Snow no longer feels like the odd man out, as Indian IT firms in the US aggressively move in to recruit local talent, partly to suit their growth plans, and partly to assuage concerns triggered by rising joblessness in the US.
In the past 12-18 months, around 15,000 US professionals have joined Indian firms across function, from entry-level customer care to senior level sales and consulting positions. And like Mr Snow, most of them had never worked with an Indian company before.
IT veterans that ET spoke to say this trend would gather strength in the coming months, as Indian players strive to address concerns over flight of jobs, besides strengthening their own onsite services delivery capability.
Indian IT’s umbrella body, Nasscom, sees US protectionism as a key issue that could slow down growth of the $50-billion technology outsourcing business, spurring Indian companies to hire more local talent. The US market accounts for 61% of the business for Indian services providers.
Today, locals comprise about 30% of the Indian IT employee base of over 100,000 in the US. This is up from just a few hundreds 4-5 years ago, when most onsite needs were met by flying out engineers from India on H1B visas and the local talent was sought only for a few consulting type jobs.
“It’s also a sign of evolution and maturity of the industry. More Indian companies will be creating onsite jobs and hiring local talent as the industry expands,” says Pramod Bhasin, chairman of Nasscom & CEO of Genpact, India’s largest business services provider.
The onsite jobs include client interfacing functions like consulting, sales, solutions requirements and solutions deployment while the manpower intensive testing, coding and maintenance work gets done from remote locations, mainly out of India. Infosys has over 11,000 employees in the US and Wipro has 7,000, about a third of who are local Americans.
Wipro also opened a new office in Atlanta this fiscal. “We intend to localise more and almost all the 1,000 positions in the Atlanta office will be staffed by local hiring,” says Saurab Govil, senior vice-president, HR, Wipro Technologies. Last year, TCS hired Read more…