Accenture said that the majority of its 24,000 recruits in Q1FY25 were concentrated in India, keeping up a trend seen in the previous two quarters.
On December 19, Accenture, which follows a September-August financial year, reported that its headcount rose to 7,99,000 in Q1FY25, with nearly half of its workforce typically based in India.
“The hiring that we saw this quarter, similar to last (quarter), was that it was concentrated in India… Looking for optimisation of right skills because a big piece of why people, for example, use India is about skills. Ten years ago, it was about labour arbitrage, today, it's about the ability to get these skills at scale,” Chief Executive Julie Sweet told analysts after declaring the results.
Additionally, the data and artificial intelligence (AI) workforce has grown to approximately 69,000, progressing towards its target of 80,000 by the end of fiscal 2026.
The Dublin-headquartered firm has added over 54,000 employees in the last three quarters. Before that, Accenture’s headcount had declined by 723 in the second quarter.
When questioned by an analyst, the management defended the Nasdaq-listed company's decision to pick most of its new recruits from India. Sweet said Accenture has a global network of over 100 centres, focussing on developing talent for business requirements, such as language and time zone needs.
“In the US, for example, we've been opening some new centres in underserved environments. We opened a centre in the Bronx recently. But all of it is kind of aimed at being very sophisticated,” Sweet added.
Further, Sweet said that a reflection of organic growth can be felt from the upward revision of guidance on both the upper and lower end. “At the high end of our guidance for the year, we're going to exit at four (percent). So, I think that it is a positive sign that we're hiring, and some of it's coming from acquisitions, but we are seeing organic momentum in our business,” Sweet said during the analyst conference call.
Accenture's revised outlook anticipates full-year revenue growth to be within the range of 4 percent to 7 percent, compared to its earlier projection of 3 percent to 6 percent
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