India IT Hiring may Resume in Q1 2023

The bad news first – if you thought that the recession-led layoffs were going to ease any time soon, brace yourself. Research indicates that the worst may be yet to come in 2023. But, India as it’s done in recent times appears set to buck this trend as another survey indicates that Indian IT industry may resume hiring in the first quarter of 2023. 

Staffing and recruitment services company Randstad says in its survey that seven of ten IT companies in India are likely to increase their headcount in the next quarter – January to March. The survey, first reported by ET, says factors like cost optimization and political and economic stability in India could be contributing to this trend. 

In fact, some of the HR executives that we spoke to confirmed this information. Of course, they did not give any indication as to whether the hiring levels would be the same as last year or the year before. “Our hiring process has kickstarted and hopefully we should hit the road sometime in the latter part of January,” says a senior HR official at a Bengaluru-based IT company. 

Global giants also appear set to hire

What’s interesting is that companies with outsourced operations in India appear to be playing a key role in this trend. Some have implemented a hiring freeze in their home geographies but are hiring more resources in India. These firms are making more investments in India to manage their business continuity plans, which would otherwise fall through given the spate of layoffs. 

Leading up to this latest survey, most reports painted a gloomy picture of a slowdown in hiring across the IT industry. However, now some global tech companies are looking at new hires and even new locations – away from Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. Pune and Kolkata are among the cities attracting more interest. 

In fact, the ET report quotes officials from Tech Mahindra and Mphasis to suggest that hiring could well increase through 2023 compared to earlier years. The officials were quite positive about overall hiring numbers being better over the next 12 months with fullstack developers, infrastructure specialists, AI, IoT  and UI / UX designers being in demand. 

The worst may be round the corner

All of this comes at a time when data from the tech layoffs database layoffs.fyi is suggesting that a total of 2.46 lakh employees were given the pink slip since the onset of Covid-19 by 1495 tech companies. The data suggests 2022 to be the worst year for the tech sector but indicates that 2023 could just turn worse. 

The data suggests more than 73,000 people lost their jobs in the United States with companies such as Twitter, Meta, Netflix, Salesforce, Google and Cisco learning the pack. In fact, about 17,000 of tech jobs were lost in India as well. 

While Amazon reduced its workforce by 20,000 people, HP lost 6,000 employees thus far followed by Meta with 4,000 job losses. Google is also bracing for yet another round of layoffs early in 2023 though there has been no official confirmation or denial of the prospect.