Coming after a forgettable year of hiring freeze, layoffs and salary cuts, the recruitment drive in the IT space is led by biggies such as Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

An analysis of the hiring plans announced by various Indian IT companies shows that headcount in the industry is expected to go up by more than 98,000.

According to analysts, increased spending on IT infrastructure and improving overseas markets for outsourcers, are among the main factors for the upbeat hiring prospects.

Diptarup Chakraborti, who is a Principal Research Analyst at global IT research firm Gartner said the industry is back on track with many projects lined up for completion.

“The industry has turned the corner and renewed optimism will bring back recruitment across the globe,” he noted.

Last week, the country’s largest software exporter TCS said it would increase headcount by 30,000 in next fiscal year while Infosys announced plans to hire 16,000 people this year.

Of the 12 companies which have announced their hiring plans, BPO giant Genpact said it would hire 10,000 people. Besides, IBM is looking at recruiting 5,000 followed by Infosys BPO (2,000), Accenture (8,000) and Mphasis (2,000).

Going by Gartner estimates, the domestic IT market is expected to grow by 19-20 per cent in 2010, a sharp rise against a 2.6 per cent growth in 2009.

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 at least 300 associates in the US and in its new facility at the Cincinnati suburb of Milford which can accommodate 1,000 associates.

Genpact has 1,500 people in the US, 90% local Americans, in cities like Wellsburg, California and Danville in Illinois. Of its 27,000 employees, Firstsource has 4,000 staff in the US (all Americans) and the $200-million Mumbai-based services player Mastek’s top management team is mostly American, based out of the US. Last year, it hired 350 local services delivery professionals as well.

“As the industry has grown bigger, there’s lot more need for long-term staff. This need is being met by local hiring. At the same time,
short-term assignments are done by a combination of locals and flying out staff from India,” says TV Mohandas Pai, member of board and director, HR, Infosys Technologies.

The present spurt in hiring locals is due to a combination of the “economic slump and more easily available talent”, says Ameet Nivsarkar, VP, Nasscom. In fact, most Indian companies hire local talent in what are Tier II cities in the US like Arkansas, St Antonio, Tampa, Kansas City, Alabama, and Buffalo.

Talent here is 15-20% cheaper than in big cities, understands the requirements, needs no training to start and service providers creating local jobs are more favourably looked at when pitching for business.

“For a lot of government and healthcare projects awarded in the past six months, customers prefer a US presence. Hence, the number of locals has gone up,” says Rishi Das, CEO, CareerNet Consulting, a Bangalore-based search firm.

According to Firstsource’s MD & CEO Ananda Mukerji, for certain processes like healthcare, records can’t go out of the country and banks may prefer their platinum and gold customers to be served onshore. “As Indian providers now offer a complete gamut of technology to business services, many processes are getting done locally,” he says.

Firstsource has centres in Kansas, Colorado, Kentucky and Miami from where it does credit card, third-party debt collection and healthcare processes. “In the past 6-9 months, we have seen that clients are more keen if you have a large onsite presence as well,” he says.

Mr Pai of Infosys believes that as companies become bigger and capture the more critical pieces of the customers’ business, about 25% of the work will be done onsite, which will be met by local hiring rather than sending people on H1B visas. In fact, in 2008, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, three of the largest Indian technology services companies, together had over 10,000 H1B visas. In 2009, the figure was less than 2,000.

Sid Pai, managing partner, TPI, a global sourcing advisory firm, sums the trend up saying that one would have to live with the idea of lower margins eventually. “As the industry expands, it will have to learn to deliver operations in consuming countries as well and live with lower margins, it’s part of the growth story,” he says.

According to a global survey conducted by consulting firm Manpower, India topped the list of countries in intention to recruit for the January-March period next year. The survey showed that Indian companies are more bullish about the future, with the number for January-March period reporting increased intention to hire than the quarter ending December 2009.

The service sector witnessed the biggest jump in hiring intent, with 20 points over the last survey. Bullish hiring intention was also spotted in sectors such as public administration, education, mining and construction. Companies in finance, insurance and wholesale & retail trade also reported strong hiring intent.

The weakest hiring pace was reported by employers in the transportation and utilities sectors, where less than 30 per cent of the employers showed an inclination to hire in the three-month period. However, all the sectors recorded an increase in hiring intent compared with the year ago period.

“As Indian employers continue to express growing confidence, we are witnessing improved opportunities for job seekers across all industry sectors. Employers indicate that hiring in India’s service sector will accelerate at a dynamic pace in the coming months,” said Naresh Malhan, managing director of Manpower India.

The survey, which covered more than 5,100 employers across 30 cities in India, revealed that India’s net employment outlook stood at 39 per cent, the highest in the world. This is an increase of 11 points over the last quarter of 2009.

The net employment outlook is derived by taking the percentage of employers anticipating total employment to increase, minus the percentage expecting to see a decrease in employment at their location in the next quarter. It also takes into consideration the seasonal adjustments in employment.

Among the various sectors in the country, services has emerged strongest in hiring intentions, with nearly half of the companies surveyed expecting to hire in the January-March period.

At the regional level, employers in the North reported the strongest hiring intentions, where nearly one in every two employers said they plan to hire. Employers in the West and the East reported equal hiring intentions followed by the South. Hiring intent has improved across all regions in the latest survey.

The global survey also said that employers in 25 out of 35 countries reported positive hiring intentions for Q1. The most optimistic employment forecasts after India were reported by employers in Brazil, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia.

The report said while five lakh new jobs have been created in some high growth industries, the overall earnings of workers have, however, declined by 1.3 per cent in the second quarter.

“The jobs created are of a contractual and casual nature without security of employment and social protection,” the report titled ‘World of Work Report 2009: The Global Jobs Crisis and Beyond’ said.

Stating that the slowdown in the economy has had an adverse impact on the quality of employment, the report stressed on the need for continued monitory and fiscal support for a sustained recovery process of the employment sector.

“Adverse impact on the quality of employment could further increase informal employment, which currently stands at 93 per cent of the workforce,” the report said.

Although the report finds employment in high carbon intensive industries relatively low in India (15 per cent) compared to other countries, it said measures to increase energy efficiency would prove beneficial for supporting more productive and greener employment opportunities.

The ILO report said the length and scope of the jobs crisis could be reduced if stimulus measures and overall policies were focused on the approach of the ILO’s ‘Global Jobs Pact’ adopted earlier this year to which India along with several other countries were signatories.

The jobs pact presents an integrated portfolio of tried and tested policies that puts employment and social protection at the centre of crisis responses.

The report underlined that “a continuation of fiscal stimulus measures, if well focused on jobs, would raise employment by 7 per cent world wide compared to an early exit situation”.

It said investments in infrastructure projects and agricultural development and continued support to small and medium enterprises lending would enable both an increase in productivity and ensure productive employment.

The report favoured increased allocation for NREGA and extending the programme to urban areas to help address under-employment.

It also said remittances to the country remained stable at around $52 billion or 4 per cent of GDP in 2008-09.

This is in stark contrast to the scenario a few months back when most of them had frozen salaries, promotions and, in some cases, saw their first ever declines in quarterly headcount additions. The sector, which employs more than 2 million people, has been one of the biggest job creators in Asia’s third-largest economy and used to hire people by thousands every quarter, mostly engineering graduates.

India’s top two IT service firms Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, each of which employ more than 100,000, used to shower employees with hefty pay hikes and perks not too long ago to keep their staff from being poached by bigger rivals such as IBM and Accenture.

“There is some confidence back in the system,” V. Balakrishnan, CFO of Infosys Technologies said at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore. “Most of the corporates are feeling much better about the economy now than they were some six to eight months back.”

Infosys, India’s second-largest software services exporter, last month raised its hiring target to 20,000 for the fiscal year that ends in March, up from its earlier forecast of 18,000, and Balakrishnan said it wanted to be well-oiled when growth returns.

Infosys, which had earlier put a hold on salary hikes and promotions for this fiscal year, said it would raise pay by an average of 8 percent this year for its employees in India. “In the beginning of the year, the environment was so challenging that we said we won’t give any wage increase for the year, and we also stopped all promotions. We had some buffer on the margins so we gave the wage increase,” Infosys’ Balakrishnan said.

Wipro Ltd, India’s No 3 software services firm, also said the IT industry was back to being bullish about its hiring outlook. “The recovery is still taking place. It’s still very slow. But I think customers have decided to move on and make things happen,” Wipro’s joint CEO of IT business Suresh Vaswani said. Wipro’s CFO of IT business Manish Dugar said there would be headcount growth going forward.

“But I don’t know if we’ll have proportionate increase in headcount to the revenue.” Wipro also said it will announce a decision on wage increases during the course of this quarter. Mahindra Satyam, earlier known as Satyam Computer Services that was rocked by India’s biggest corporate fraud, is also looking to hire people and reinstating various employee benefits.

The company currently has a “virtual pool” of about 5,000 employees, who are not actively involved on any outsourcing project and are on reduced salaries. On Monday, Tata Consultancy Services, India’s top outsourcing company, had said the company was likely to increase wages in the next fiscal year.

The change of sentiment in the Indian IT sector gives millions of Indians, directly or indirectly employed by the sector, a cause to cheer. However, industry observers caution that the sector is not yet out of the woods, and it may take some time before hiring and pay scales reach pre-recession level.

“I don’t think the hiring and pay scale in the sector will reach pre-recession levels any time soon,” Tejas Doshi, head of research at Sushil Finance, said from Mumbai. “We used to see companies hiring 15 percent to 20 percent of their employee base on an incremental basis. I don’t think we’ll see companies hiring 20 percent of their employee base in a year anytime soon. I think those days are gone,” Doshi added.

Wipro’s Dugar said any pay increases the company announces won’t be in line with the heady days of the past. Infosys’ Balakrishnan said the 8 percent wage hike the company has given is as good as the 16 percent given during the good times, especially when some of its peers are still holding on to their purses.

“Wage increase is a function of how the environment is. When the environment gets better and people start hiring more the wage pressure may come back,” he said. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry believes that it would take another one or two years for hiring to be at pre-recession levels.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen in 2010 at all, probably it could happen in 2011,” Chowdhry said. Mahindra Satyam’s president of global operations, Atul Kunwar, believes that it will take at least two years for IT budgets of customers to go back to pre-recession levels.

The government data shows that sectors such as textiles, automobiles, and IT/BPO, among others, generated around 5 lakh jobs in the July-September quarter this fiscal.

Meanwhile, the public sector banks are getting ready to spread the cheer as they embark on a large-scale recruitment drive in a bid to replace their estimated 40% of their workforce that retires over the next two years.

Currently, there are about 8 lakh people employed in public banks across the country, as per industry estimates.
With about 3.2 lakh employees set to retire by 2011-12, there will be a large number of positions vacant in these banks.

Although not all the slots will be filled, banks are looking to spruce up hiring at all levels and the number will be significant, said senior executives in the banking industry.

MD Mallya, CMD, Bank of Baroda (BOB), said: “We are looking to add talent for two reasons. One, we need manpower to facilitate our expansion plans and two, there will be quite a few slots vacant with senior employees retiring over the next two years.”

Mr Mallya added that the bank plans to add about 1500-2000 heads in the current fiscal itself.
The country’s largest bank State Bank Of India (SBI) is hiring more than 13,000 people in the current fiscal.

However, hiring may not be in direct proportion to the number retiring. Said Bank of Maharashtra CMD Allen Pereira: “We will hire in sizeable number. But not all the positions that fall vacant will get filled up as some jobs get eliminated as a result of improved technologies over the years.”

The global meltdown that shook the financial sector last year and cause developed world to slump into recession caused serious demand drop for India’s exports sector and large-scale job losses. In April-June 2009 quarter job loses were placed 1.3 lakh.

The strong recovery in jobs in the last quarter has taken the net job additions over the 12 months ending September 2009 to a positive 1.5 lakh, limited survey by the government has revealed.

“The stimulus packages given out by the government helped increase liquidity, thereby stimulating production and consumption. This inturn led to employment generation,” Said Harish Rawat, minister of state, labour and employment told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.

Added BP Pant, director, labour and skill development at FICCI: “Market sentiments have improved over the past few months. While the country’s exports were hit badly, other sectors were relatively better off.”

The size of the offer made to a student from DU is what has made the cheerful difference to the ritual of foreign banks picking up students from Indian institutions, as such handsome offers are the perquisite of IITs and IIMs. The highest that a DU student has got in the past is Rs 14 lakh from Lehman Brothers in 2007.

However, that single spectacular difference has disrupted the private life of Adit, who is desperately staying clear of the media glare. The pleasantly surprised son of Prof Anita Mathur, who also teaches in the same college, has been the first pick of first timer Deutsche from DU. An avid sports enthusiast Adit’s father is the COO of GMR Sports which owns Delhi Daredevils.

“It was completely unexpected. I couldn’t prepare much in advance, but brushing up the basics helped a lot,” Adit told ET. He is flying off to London next July for the Graduate Analyst Training Programme, where he will interact with several other students from across the globe.

Undergrad nets Rs 32 lakh offer from Deutsche Bank

25 Nov 2009, 0705 hrs IST, Mahima Puri & Shreya Biswas, ET Bureau

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NEW DELHI: For someone who aspires for a hole-in-one as an amateur golfer, Adit Mathur has made a Tiger Woodsian debut on the job circuit. Top 10 paymasters
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The 20-year-old undergrad of Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) is now the toast of Delhi University (DU) as he has teed in an offer from Deutsche Bank for an annual compensation package of Rs 32 lakh ($69,000). Mathur, a resident of Civil Lines in Delhi, will be trained in London next year for a plum posting abroad.

The size of the offer made to a student from DU is what has made the cheerful difference to the ritual of foreign banks picking up students from Indian institutions, as such handsome offers are the perquisite of IITs and IIMs. The highest that a DU student has got in the past is Rs 14 lakh from Lehman Brothers in 2007.

However, that single spectacular difference has disrupted the private life of Adit, who is desperately staying clear of the media glare. The pleasantly surprised son of Prof Anita Mathur, who also teaches in the same college, has been the first pick of first timer Deutsche from DU. An avid sports enthusiast Adit’s father is the COO of GMR Sports which owns Delhi Daredevils.

“It was completely unexpected. I couldn’t prepare much in advance, but brushing up the basics helped a lot,” Adit told ET. He is flying off to London next July for the Graduate Analyst Training Programme, where he will interact with several other students from across the globe.

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Deutsche’s routemap to SRCC may have its beginnings in IIMs as the bank, according to Adit, has a feeling for students from the B-school who have moved from the college. He also said the size of the package is quite justified, considering it’s an international location and involves high costs.

So far, SRCC has placed 40 undergrads and 14 post graduate students from its Global Business Operations course. Some 44 companies have already visited SRCC, some of whom are returning after a year’s break. Mazars, a Paris-based audit firm with offices in 77 countries, is also in Delhi for the first time to recruit students and is expected to pick up a few of them.

SRCC is not the only college basking in the hiring glory. Neither is Adit the only student. A student from St Stephen’s College, Sukrit, too has got a similar offer from Deutsche Bank.

The campuses at Kirori Mal College (KMC), Sri Venkateswara College (Venky), Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR) too have been lit up by the happy visits of hiring personnel.

For instance, placement chairpersons at DU colleges say that companies like Google, Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain & Co, YES Bank, HCL, Wipro are regular recruiters. Others like Ernst & Young, KPMG, UBS, Jaypee Group and Infraline are some of the newcomers scouting for talent in DU.

More than a hundred offers by around 15 companies have already been made in Venky, which has also seen the return of Maruti Suzuki. LSR too has got about 200 offers so far, which means it has already found jobs of almost half of the 480 students who will graduate in 2010. The college has seen 40 companies visiting the campus so far, while last year, the figure was lower at 30.

“We have received an average offer of Rs 5.5 lakh, while the highest offer at Rs 9 lakh is from Nomura,” said LSR placement cell chairperson and advisor Arvind Kumar. The Japanese financial services company, too, is returning after a year’s break.

Similarly, Kirori Mal college, where the placement process has just begun, has already witnessed 16 offers with an average package of Rs 5.2 lakh. But the college is hoping for bigger offers in the coming months.

This year, DU has also introduced online registration system for those who desire to be placed. More than 8,000 students have registered with Central Placement Cell (CPC) so far.

This too has happened for the first time showing the way for students like Adit and Sukrit who can have their dream jobs and watch the British Open or a few matches of the English Premier League.

They are not just expecting more business from the domestic market, but anticipate a boom in overseas business too, thanks to cash-crunched foreign companies looking at cost rationalisation.

Cisco has drawn up huge recruitment plans as it shifts some of its activities from abroad to India.

The company plans to boost its manpower in India to 15,000 over the next two years, adding 12,000 new workers.

Cognizant has added a net 8,135 people since December last year. Cognizant CFO Gordon Coburn said the company will continue to hire aggressively.

Accenture said it will add around 8,000 new people in India by the end of next year, taking its total employee strength to 50,000.

Accenture’s focus in India is going to be in the analytics space, company chairman and CEO William D Green said at the India Economic Summit where the overall mood was buoyant. Hirings in the IT space have in fact been continuing over the last few months.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)has already hired 7,800 people. TCS had made some 24,000 offers in 2008-09, according to its Q2 analyst call.

T major Wipro has also been hiring and after recruiting 1,000 people in the first six months of the fiscal, plans to add another 2,000 in the second half.

The company is also planning to extend salary increments across the board in Q4, which is significant considering it had not even budgeted for a hike at the beginning of the year.

Infosys BPO said it would hire 1,500-2,000 people by the end of this fiscal. The company is also reportedly planning to set up a new delivery centre in the US before end of 2009-10.

Infosys, in its Q2 earnings call, indicated that it would add 20,000 people instead of 18,000 indicated earlier. The additional 2,000 would be partly in BPO while the rest would make up laterals at Infosys Technologies.

iGate said it plans to add about 1,500 new recruitments in 2010. CEO Phaneesh Murthy said he expected IT budgets to be up 2-4% next year.

Hyundai has added a new manufacturing line to meet increased demand, has hired as many as 1200 workers between July and September this year and plans to further boost its strength as it looks to attract NRIs and expatriates to join its Indian workforce.

Nissan has said it would be more than doubling its manpower in India as it hopes that rising economic activity and disposable incomes will boost demand.

The company, which is setting up a new plant near Chennai, has plans to boost its manpower from 700 to 1500 by May.

Maruti, which plans to boost annual production to one million units, has plans to add around 400 new people including a mix of engineers, technicians, MBAs and CAs.

The survey pointed out that salary increases in India and China in the current year have been the lowest since 2005, even as they were much better than markets such as Japan and Hong Kong, where companies increased average salaries by 1-2%.

“Apart from factors like growing business activity and increased domestic demand in India, demographics also play a key role in deciding salary hikes. The fact that many employees in India are in the age group of 24-35 years at junior to senior levels of management, it contributes to higher salary increases than other countries,” said Sandeep Chaudhary, leader of performance & rewards consulting in India, Hewitt Associates.

Consumer durables was one of the sectors in India that grew on the back of consistent domestic demand. LG Electronics director (HR & MS) YV Verma said the sector is expected to give around 14-15% salary hike in the coming year.

The survey, that covered more than 280 companies in India, also revealed that one in every four companies in India froze salaries at the same level as last year. As compared to this, for the coming year, just 6% of those surveyed said they could opt for salary freeze next year. But as P Dwarakanath, group HR director at Max India said: “Companies would be more selective and cautious while giving salary hikes in 2010, particularly double-digit hikes.”

The survey also pointed that over half of the companies surveyed in India added manpower this year and intend to recruit more people in 2010. These would include firms such as auto major Maruti Suzuki which started hiring for its upcoming research facility and is yet to complete the target of bringing on board close to 1,000 professionals for the unit.

Talking about salary hikes planned for next year, SY Siddiqui, head of human resources at Maruti Suzuki, said: “It is important to see if signs of economic recovery are consistent and will lead to sustainable growth and development. Budget announcements for the auto sector in the coming year will also impact salary increases to some extent.”

The naukri.com’s monthly ‘JobSpeak index’ increased to 729 in September from 701 in August this year.

“The secular trend is positive across sectors. Had it not been for an early festival season we may have seen further improvement in the index.

“The good news is that the IT and BPO sectors which are big employers especially at entry and junior levels seem to be in positive territory after a long time,” Info Edge (owner of naukri.com) COO and Director Hitesh Oberoi said.

Moreover, on the three-month moving average, the index inched up to 719 in September from 715 in August.

Last month, companies’ hiring activity saw a positive trend with 14 out of 41 sectors covered showing a double digit rise in hiring activities.

The IT-enabled services (ITeS) and BPO, real estate and retail sectors saw a significant push in September as compared to August, the report stated.

The ITeS/BPO sector, saw an increase of 18.3 per cent in hiring activity in September, while real estate and retail saw a rise of 36.8 per cent and 12.2 per cent, respectively.