Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT company, is expanding globally and in keeping with its rapid pace of growth is also bullish on hiring non-Indians.
Over the next three years, the IT giant will almost double the percentage of its non-Indians staff.
In an interview with Financial Ttimes, S Padmanabhan, the company's global head of human resources, said that TCS's foreign staff would comprise 15 per cent of the IT major's workforce in three years, compared with 8.3 per cent now. The percentage of non-Indians on the company's payroll was less than half a percentage point four years ago.
In the second quarter results declared by TCS on October 16, Padmanabhan said: "We continue to be the employer of choice in this industry with the best retention rate and this is helping us execute on the ground globally."
The company, during Q2, hired 8,919 employees. In India, there were 3,764 were campus hires and 4,200 lateral hires. At the end of Q2, the total employee strength of the company was 78,028, with employees coming from 60 different nationalities. Non-Indian nationals formed 8.3 per cent (7.3 per cent in Q1) of the total employee base and 25 per cent were women.
With the company diversifying, becoming bigger, and serving various global markets, it has realised the need to hire local talent, especially in terms of language skills.
Padmanabhan told FT that it is important for TCS to hire a workforce from more than one nationality and thus add value to its business model by employing staff 'in developed countries and low-cost regions bordering their main markets, like eastern Europe, Latin America and China.' TCS is also hiring foreign staff through acquisitions.
India's huge and low-cost talent pool has been a major strength for Indian outsourcing firms, but as these Indian giants expand globally the need for non-Indian employees is being felt more and more.
TCS has hired 500 people in China, 350 more in Hungary, about 1,100 in Brazil and 250 in Uruguay. In the United States, TCS has 800 employees, while it has 250 in the United Kingdom and the rest of western Europe, the FT said.
India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue and this is also another reason why Indian IT majors are looking to foreign shores to hire talent.
For example, another Indian IT giant Infosys Technologies plans to add 10,000 employees in the last two quarters of the current fiscal year, of which a significant chunk will be non-Indians. Infosys will recruit hundreds of students from undergraduate and business schools in the United States and Britain, who will undergo a six-month training programme in India before being posted to one of the company's offices abroad.
Wipro, the third-largest computer outsourcing company, is opening a business process outsourcing centre in Romania and expects staffing to reach 1,000 over the next year, the FT reported.