Global captives and non-techs on a tech talent hiring spree

India has been a hub of research and development (R&D) centres for foreign entities in retail, healthcare, auto, aerospace and technology, with cities such as Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai lending tech and innovation support to their parent entities abroad.

Around 20% of the lateral movement from IT firms have been absorbed into captives and non-tech firms that are going digital. This is largely because of a lateral hiring squeeze at IT services firms, said Guruprasad Srinivasan, chief executive at India’s largest staffing firm Quess Corp.

“We saw demand in turn coming from auto, engineering and 5G as everyone is now exploring and implementing digital programs, unlike in the past where only tech companies used to hire such tech talent,” Srinivasan said.

Captives’ talent demand has grown by 12-15% in the last three years, double that of IT firms, said Vikram Ahuja, co-founder and CEO of job marketplace Talent500.

“This year has been a hard one on the services industry…in general, it created a perception that the markets there are very uncertain. The GCC industry has benefited from it. We are seeing a lot of inbound applications from people who are in the services industry and fairly senior people,” Ahuja said.

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Captives of Airbus and Daimler have told ET that they would continue to hire engineering and tech resources in India and that such hiring is from a talent and competence perspective and not the cost angle.Daimler Truck AG’s truck technology head Andreas Gorbach said it would hire 750 candidates across IT and product engineering in its Bengaluru centre, its largest R&D facility outside of Germany. Daimler Truck’s connectivity domain – both inside the vehicle and offboard or cloud solutions – is entirely led out of the India centre.

Aerospace giant Airbus said it will add around 400 engineering jobs this year in technologies such as robotics, autonomy, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), drones, sustainable aviation fuel and artificial intelligence (AI) where related engineering can be designed, developed and certified from its Bengaluru centre. It also had a hiring drive at the recently concluded Aero India Show 2023 in the city.

“As of today, around 1,000 engineers are engaged across our development portfolio. We are looking at 40% growth this year. We also have this IT team (in India) which is growing very fast. We will be able to develop this collaborative approach between aerospace engineering together with our digital skilled people,” Frederic Combes, vice president and head of engineering, Airbus India and South Asia told ET. Airbus has a total headcount of 2,000 in India, comprising both engineering and IT talent.

Human resource experts and GCC consultants say multinational companies have benefitted from reduced lateral hiring at IT firms as attrition has been plateauing at the IT majors amid fears of an impending recession.

Ahuja also said that layoffs at companies such as Microsoft or Amazon would not impact the general perception of the R&D hubs in India as most layoffs are in customer support, sales and business operations and not “tech-related” roles.