Global captives buck the trend, likely to hire 30% more this year

Technology captives or Global Capability Centres (GCC) are bucking the broader industry’s hiring downtrend. This year, GCC hiring could climb up to 30% from last year, with four out of five facilities adding jobs, data accessed by ET showed.

Fresher hiring by GCCs will mainly benefit premier institutes, experts said. This comes as the top Mumbai-listed IT services companies, otherwise among the leading absorbers of fresh engineering and management talent, have decided to skip the campuses.

To be sure, GCCs are not entirely unaffected by the global macroeconomic situation. Hence, their manpower plans alone can’t offset a virtual hiring freeze at the large listed outsourcing behemoths.


Venu Lambu, chief executive, Randstad Digital, said that within the GCC ecosystem, there is a strong hiring intent for tech roles in non-tech GCCs in India. Lambu added that around 70-75% of the GCC employee base are permanent hires.

“And, this year, we expect a 25-30% uptick in hiring intent across GCCs in India, as compared with 2022,” he said, adding that four in five of these facilities are expanding their payrolls.

India has around 1,600 GCCs that together employ almost 1.66 million people, data from Nasscom showed.

“As part of our campus strategy, we have a long-standing relationship with several universities including the top IITs, and NITs and a few select campuses in the country,” said Chakra Mantena, managing director, head of technology global centers, Morgan Stanley. “While we hire students from multiple domains, STEM talent takes precedence in terms of volume, and we believe India's talent landscape will continue to grow.”

The hiring ranges from high-demand talent (AI, Mobile Development, Cloud and big data) to hybrid talent with skills across multiple disciplines such as full stack developers and DevOps professionals.

According to ISG, as cost pressures mount, firms are moving more work to their GCCs.

“We estimate GCCs to continue hiring as the GCC ecosystem generally follows a cyclical growth and demand trend. Currently, most GCCs are in the build phase where they are growing their talent base,” said Namratha Darshan, chief business leader, ISG India Research. “While the IT services segment has slowed hiring, we still expect some talent wars in niche segments, with the GC cohort, likes of AI and cyber security which continue to be in demand,” she added.

Top institutes

However, the GCC segment is not immune to the global technology headwinds and is likely to see some impact. The GCC ecosystem is expected to expand by around 100,000 in FY24, compared with around 170,000 estimated earlier, according to Xpheno data.

While GCCs go for the top layer of tech and business talent, their intake numbers are limited and do not match those of the services cohort, said Kamal Karant, cofounder XPheno.

“The revised outlook for net headcount growth for GCCs in FY24 is now less than 100,000. Fresher addition prospects look low with a 50-60% drop in volume. With most large employers not campus bound this year, GCCs may absorb 6,000 - 7,000 freshers at best this fiscal,” said Karanth.

He added that around 1,200-1,300 GCCs in India are in the build stage where they are hiring fresher talent and training them, but the GCC demand is much smaller than that of the services sector.

“These companies tend to prefer institutes like IITs or the premier talent across the tier 1 institutes,” said Karanth, adding that even the largest GCCs won’t be making more than 200-300 fresher offers at their best, in the current environment.

However, the demand for lateral experienced technology talent will still continue as Karanth expects almost 70% of the lateral talent requirement of the GCC ecosystem to come from the IT services sector.

With inputs from Beena Parmar