Mid-size IT companies poised to boost hiring

Amid retrenchments in IBM and threat of tough measures at Infosys, a clutch of medium and small-sized IT players in India are on a hiring spree to expand their relatively smaller workforce. Persistent Systems, with a strong focus on emerging areas like cloud computing and analytics, plans to add more than 2,000 staff, or 29%, to its current strength of 7,000. Others such as Zensar and NIIT also said hiring in the next financial year (2014-15) would be higher than the current year.
While IBM has not yet shared the number of people it has retrenched in India as part of a global resource action drive, it is believed the number could be over 2,000. Infosys executive chairman NR Narayana Murthy recently indicated tough measures, especially at senior levels in the company that is now facing high attrition as well – after two decades as a high-volume recruiter. On the other hand, much to the delight of scores of software professionals, medium and small-sized companies are increasing their hiring target for the financial year starting this April. “We expect to hire 2,000-plus on a net basis. We are hiring for our cloud project and other new technologies,” said Mritunjay Singh, chief operating officer, Persistent Systems. “While a bulk of our hiring will be in India, we will hire onsite as well. We will hire a 100 in the US, 15-20 in France and Malaysia,” said Singh. “We see strong growth ahead.”
“The mid-tier companies have been more conservative in their hiring plans in the past two years but now with the industry showing promise of robust growth, the mid-tier (companies) are getting more aggressive in their capability-building plans,” said Ganesh Natarajan, vice-chairman and CEO, Zensar Technologies. Zensar plans to add about 10% more to its current strength of 65,00 associates. “Our hiring next year will be better than this year,” said Arvind Thakur, CEO, NIIT Technologies, without giving details.