MNCs hire staff to boost offshoring

Captive Organisations Of US, UK Firms Plan To Hike Offshore Teams To Cut Operational Costs

Top MNC tech firms such as IBM, Accenture and Cap Gemini are stepping up hiring in India, at a time when their Indian rivals plan to slow hiring new staff in order to cope with a lower demand of software services in the top markets of US and Europe.
While European IT major Atos Origin plans to double its workforce in India from the existing level of 3,300 to 6,000 by 2010, Accenture has already announced that it would be increasing its India headcount from around 37,000 professionals currently to almost 50,000 within one year.
Captive organisations of large enterprises in the US and UK are seeking to increase their offshore teams in order to lower their operational costs. Tesco, the world’s second biggest retailer, plans to add few hundred more professionals to its existing team of around 3,000 employees at the Bangalore centre. “We want this centre to become the engineering hub for us, and there is a lot of scope for
scale expansion,” Mike McNamara, operations and information technology director at Tesco, told ET in an interview earlier this month. The retailer saves around $60 million every year by outsourcing to India.
Captives such as Tesco are hiring professionals with specialised skills, opening newer avenues for experienced professionals working at the Indian software companies.
Indian tech biggies, on the other hand, continue to see attrition rates of anywhere between 11-13%, and even more, as their MNC rivals alongwith captive organisations of large customers such as Tesco continue to attract professionals with niche skills and domain knowledge.
“Our attrition rate is still around 11%, which is not significantly down,” said Pratik Kumar, executive vice-president (HR), Wipro. “We find that smaller captives operating in niche areas, apart from MNCs, are still hiring,” he added. “Today, openings in the IT industry have more to do with specific skills and for professionals who are in the five-seven years experience,” said GC Jayaprakash, principal consultant at Stanton Chase International.