HCL Technologies to hire 30,000 people this year

 HCL Technologies, India’s fourth largest IT services firm, plans to hire 25000-30000 people this year and applies for 640 H-1B visas, as it sees more customers outsource technology work and deliver services.

The company said it plans to hire more full stack engineers unlike in the past when it focused on specialisation in one development lifecycle.

“We expect that we would need anywhere between 25000-30000 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, HCL told. He said these people would include market hires, freshers and others.

While the company has 127875 employees as on September 30; its net addition in Q2 was 3754 people.

HCL Tech has seen a surge in deal wins and that 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 are of the view that hiring by Indian IT services firms has started resuming in the past few months.

“Hiring has clearly improved. This is more so because the IT industry has dropped their over-cautionary stance and they have been able to rework on their business models and looking at new territories, and hence there is a certain amount of revival in hiring. It is not yet as dramatic as it used to be,” Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and executive vice president, TeamLease.

Meanwhile, HCL Tech has significantly reduced its dependency on H1B visas as localisation improved to nearly 65% in the US.

In a fresh bid, the Donald Trump-led administration further tightened the H1 B visa scrutiny. Last week the US General Services Administration said in a note that it was looking at a modified selection process in tune with the “Buy American and Hire American” policies of the US government.

Apparao said there been delays in H1B visa issuance resulting in reduced dependence on such visas.

“We applied for 640 H1B visas this year and got approval for nearly 400,” said Apparao, adding that “localisation is something which is inevitable for the Industry and our localisation percentage is anywhere between 65-70% in most of the places”.

In the US, HCL Tech has 17000 odd employees and nearly 64.7% of them are local. This clearly has brought down the company's dependence on H1B visa and L1 visas negligible, said the human resources head.