GCCs lead India’s tech hiring, surpass 1 lakh hires in FY25

BENGALURU: India’s technology sector expanded its workforce by 1.2 lakh people in 2024-25, with global capability centres (GCCs) accounting for over 1 lakh of these roles. It is significant that GCCs hired over 100,000 professionals during this period, up from 90,000 last year. Overall, the tech industry has 5.8 million employees compared to 5.6 million in the year-ago period.
Through the first nine months of the 2024-25 fiscal year, top Indian IT firms hired just 11,000 people. In fact, The top five Indian IT services organisations increased their workforce by only 5,190 employees during the 2023-24 financial year. TOI reported how this will be the second consecutive year where GCCs will surpass IT firms in net hiring.
Even as India’s tech sector is becoming a $300 billion industry in the 2025-26 financial year, the last few years have seen business models become dynamic and outcome-based. For the first time, Nasscom highlighted an even distribution in export revenues of $224 billion between MNCs (including GCCs) and Indian IT firms, with each contributing $112 billion.
The pendulum has swung from an employees’ market to an employers’ market, even as the IT sector’s business model is undergoing a massive transformation, with AI disrupting the linear relationship between revenue and employment. The current scenario reflects a period when major IT companies are experiencing single-digit growth rates and workforce reductions, while GCCs contributed significantly to employment growth in the previous year. While Nasscom has not provided detailed breakdowns, GCCs continue to dominate the tech hiring landscape. GCCs continue to accelerate India’s tech story. India has 1,760 GCCs with an increased focus on high-value services and ER&D.
At the recent Nasscom Technology & Leadership Forum (NTLF), HCL CEO C Vijayakumar said if the IT services industry is “paranoid” about the change like an “existential threat,” it will come out winners in the long term. “That’s (fresher hiring numbers) absolutely the wrong question to ask. How can you create more value out of the 200,000 people? Can you create twice the value with the same number of people? It means the same thing. And if you challenge yourself in that direction, then I think the business will unlock a completely new growth. I’m really betting on the fact that it will unlock more human potential in many ways,” he said.
Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar told TOI recently that with machines writing 20% of the code, teams can accomplish more tasks with fewer personnel. This, Kumar said, creates an interesting economic scenario known as Jevons Paradox, where increased efficiency in resource usage leads to higher overall demand for that resource. In AI’s case, the efficiency it brings is enabling a lot more to be accomplished using AI, thereby increasing its use.

Kumar said GCCs are not adversaries, and Cognizant is beginning to work actively with them to do some parts of their work. He said he has set up a team to cater to GCCs. “I’m doing 10 GCC deals – we are setting up GCCs for companies and developing microservices for them. Many GCCs are in engineering and in operations, which was not outsourced for a long time. Now that it is coming all the way to India, it is open for partners to be a part of it. Which means the addressable spend is going to change.”
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, partner at Catalincs, a tech growth advisory firm, said, “It’s akin to the tale of two cities. The past year was another year of tepid growth for major IT services companies and of outsized growth for GCCs, resulting in the net hiring by GCCs being substantially higher for the second year in a row. With AI fundamentally reshaping the ‘how’ of delivering value to clients, IT services companies need to reimagine their USP and cannot play by yesterday’s rules,” he said.
Ramamoorthy said it is estimated that IT services companies generated approximately $20 billion in free cash flow this past year, and more than 75% of that was returned to shareholders. “These companies need to reinvest into the business to address this structural shift, differentiate themselves, and grow. Else, GCCs will continue to be the Pied Piper for IT talent in the country.”
Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar believes IT firms and GCCs complement each other and can benefit from this synergy. “We feel that there is a good balance between what the global companies, MNCs, and what the India-based IT services providers are doing. The fact is that they figured out a way to coexist. I know there was a time when there was always talk about IT GCC versus IT services providers and so on. However, most service providers that I know of have created a GCC practice within them, which means they’re serving the GCCs in some sense. So, that’s a good balance,” he said at the NTLF 2025 held in Mumbai recently.