City MNCs to hire 8,000 IT professionals by Q1-2019

Chennai

“At least 7,000 to 8,000 IT vacancies should be filled by the end of the financial year. Mostly they will be lateral recruitments of individuals with three to seven years of hands-on experience in technology. There should be at least 35-40 per cent hiring on the operations side as well,” revealed the source, privy to the developments.

Industry watchers are viewing these headwinds in the infotech sector keenly, as the state has been struggling to maintain its tag as an IT hotspot. The government is also on a war footing to get its act together, seen in its recent efforts to brainstorm with industry honchos to re-establish TN’s dominance in this space. It is also learnt that on October 12, State IT Secretary Santosh Babu had chaired a day-long offsite programme with about 30 C-Level executives (CEOs, CFOs) from top IT companies, a majority of them based out of Chennai.

Babu touched on the state’s IT policy and its benefits, willingness from the IT department to help the industry in a comprehensive manner. He had also urged the IT companies facing issues or challenges to reach out to the government machinery besides advising the CXOs to come out with innovative ideas and solutions to work with the government. Such a move would create a high impact for TN-IT in the global space, he said.

M Balasubramaniam, MD, Blackboard Technology India, & Chair, NASSCOM GCC Council – TN and Kerala, who attended the programme, confirmed this to DTNext, saying, “IT industry veteran Pari Natrajan, CEO, Zinnov LLC, was also a keynote speaker in this meeting. He talked about the evolution of the role of country managers in companies with Global Capability Centres (GCC). He also delved into the challenges and future course they need to consider.” According to Nasscom, Global In-House Centers or GICs are the ‘new’ business-as-usual for companies and it is only apt to (re) christen them as Global Capability Centers (GCCs).

Balasubramaniam exuded optimism about the IT industry’s prospects in the state. According to him, the hiring of resources has been going on at a frenetic pace with many of the GCC companies keenly indicating their intention to expand their footprint here. “In my view, employment opportunities are huge with growth in GCC companies,” he says, highlighting the advantages of Chennai over other locations such as Hyderabad and Pune. Ready-made talent pool, the ability to learn and adapt to newer and emerging technologies and the loyalty factor were among the key reasons for the city to figure as a top-notch hiring hotspot.

“The focus has shifted from employability to deployability. From hiring and training, the emphasis is now on train and hire. Also, it is no longer the game of volume hiring as companies are only for value hiring,” Balasubramaniam said, noting that “purpose hiring” is the latest mantra for IT companies.

There are over 60 plus GCC organisations based out of Chennai. These include Amazon, Athena, Astrazeneca, Bancasella, Barclays, BNY Mellon, Caterpillar, Citibank, Danfoss, Dupont, Equiniti, Fidelity, Ford, FLSmidth, Miramed Ajuba, Olam, Paypal, Philips, RBS, Renault Nissan, RR Donnelley, Shell, Temenos, Thryve Digital, Wells Fargo and World Bank.