India’s fourth largest IT services company HCL Technologies is looking to hire nearly 30,000 people this year, as it is looking at more prospects of outsourcing technology and delivery services work.
The company said it plans to hire more full stack engineers unlike in the past when it focused on specialization in one development lifecycle.
“We expect that we would need anywhere between 25,000-30,000 people (this fiscal) for us to maintain the growth rate what we have given as guidance for the market,” Apparao V V, Chief Human Resources Officer at HCL Technologies, said in an interview. He said these people would include market hires, freshers and others. As of September 30th,  the company has 127,875 employees; its net addition in Q2 was 3,754 people.
Recently, HCL Tech has seen an increase in deals, which is expected to result in a higher demand for talent. It signed 17 transformational deals in areas such as digital & analytics, cloud, IoT, cybersecurity and other services. Analysts predict that hiring by Indian IT service firms has started resuming in the past few months.
According to recent reports, the IT sector has begun hiring again. The sector had seen a turbulent past couple of months, which saw more than 56,000 employees getting laid off with the Trump administration’s tightening of the H-1B visa rules making matters worse.
However, as The Daily mentions, the company drastically reduced its dependency on the H-1B visa as localization improved to nearly 65%. Apparao also added that there has been a delay in the issuance of visas leading to reduced dependency on it. He added that they applied for 640 H-1B visas this year and got approval for nearly 400. Apparao said that localization is inevitable and that HCL Tech has a localization percentage of anything between 65-70% in most places.
In the US, HCL Tech has around 17,000 employees and nearly 65% are local.
