BANGALORE: Indian IT service firms are looking to throw open their gates yet again to prospective employees as the gloom of the global recession lifts from the $60 billion industry and demand for outsourcing services improves.

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 Read more…

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NEW DELHI: Indian employees maintained high level of confidence in the future of their companies in the third quarter of this year compared to their global peers, a study says.

As per the study by global HR solutions provider Kenexa, except India, China and Brazil, employees from nine other countries surveyed reported a decline in employee confidence in the third quarter as compared to the previous quarter.

“Globally there was about one point decline in the third quarter 2009 (in the employee confidence index), compared to five point improvement in the second quarter.

“China and India sustained and built very slightly on the improvements seen in the second quarter of 2009, while Japan reversed a second quarter downward trend,” Kenexa Research Institute research consultant Anne Herman said.

Global employee confidence, which is a quarterly measure of the degree of confidence employees have in their employers’ marketplace competitiveness and their own careers, dropped to 97.9 at the end of September from 98.9 in June this year.

The country-wise employee confidence index score for India was 100.2 in September quarter, rising marginally from 99.6 in Read more…

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BEIJING: Chinese investors should employ more Indians to run their projects in India instead of bringing large number of workers from China. This is New Delhi’s latest response to complaints concerning India’s reluctance to grant enough visas for Chinese workers.

An India-specific approach will have to be thought over by Chinese companies, S Jaishankar, India’s new ambassador in Beijing told a conference attended by Indian and Chinese businessmen and officials. He pointed out that companies from other foreign countries did not feel the need to bring their own workers to projects in India, which has a vast reservoir of skilled workmen and a long history of industry and entrepreneurship.

“I have personal experience in working with many of India’s other major economic partners. I cannot recall their investments and projects requiring such large manpower support from home,” Jaishankar, who was earlier ambassador in Singapore, said.

The statement comes at a time when several Indian companies have joined the chorus along with their Chinese partners about increasing the issuance of visas for Chinese workers. But the Indian Read more…

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