IT firms to hire about 30,000 experienced hands

Returning to the employment orbit, the mid-tier IT companies plan to take in 25,000 to 30,000 experienced hands in the next three to nine months. Those on the lookout for trained hands are companies like GlobalLogic India, Aricent, MindTree, CPA Global, Sapient, Symphony Services, Citrix, Adobe, Persistent Solutions, nVidia, Amazon, Agilent and Vertex.

The demand has been spurred by a spurt in outsourcing, better order positions and companies expanding their India operations and moving up the value chain. "Customers are stretching their dollars, and outsourcing helps them do that. That's what's driving demand for fresh talent at present," said Prashant Bhatnagar, Director - Hiring, Sapient. Many companies hiring now had no bench staff or have increased their utilisation and now need more staff as more work is being offshored.

As reported by the Economic Times, also, companies like Applied Materials, Volvo, Boeing, Bank of America, Amazon, the United Health Group and Societe Generale have farmed out work for new enterprise applications development, R&D (research and development), engineering services and professional services like customised software development - among others, driving demand. "Hiring numbers are back with a vengeance. We do see new demand in areas like software testing, infrastructure management, Internet technologies, enterprise applications development and so on," said Sanjay Shelvankar, Talent Acquisition Head, MindTree. MindTree plans to hire 500-600 lateral employees with at least four years experience.

Niche providers, too, are scouting for experienced talent. For instance, CPA Global, which does legal processes and global patent filing work for clients like Microsoft and Rio Tinto out of its Noida, U.S. and Europe-based facilities, plans to increase India headcount to 2,000 by end-2010. Also, Aricent, the telecom-focussed software developer with 6,000 of its 8,000 staff in India, will add another 700 to its India operations by March next year. It's looking for experts with two to six years experience in technologies like 3G wireless, voice over Internet protocol, multi-media handsets and Brew technology, a telecom application development platform.

"The new hiring is targetted towards work being farmed out by global companies. Now, a lot of critical high-end work is being sent to India and these niche providers are hiring to cater to such demand in applications development, R&D and software engineering space," said a source familiar with offshore developments, who requested anonymity.

While this has brought new opportunity for the mid-level and niche IT companies, triggering a hiring binge among them, the big companies are not entirely immune to the trend. "For this fiscal, we have revised new hires to 20,000 from 18,000 out of which about 4,500 will be lateral hires. This upward revision has been done due to new demand in areas like infrastructure management services and business solutions," said Mohandas Pai, HR Head, Infosys Technologies.