Big Tech hiring shows signs of recovery in India, six months after hitting record low

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Active job openings at FAAMNG companies—Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet)—are seeing a surge in recent months in India, following a challenging period of mass global layoffs and a tough business environment.

As of June 2024, the current active volume of openings from this cohort has increased to 5,500. This is still approximately down by 50 percent compared to the typical active hiring volume from this cohort in India, according to data from specialist staffing firm Xpheno, accessed by Moneycontrol.

Jobs openings by FAAMNG firms in India that were directly accepting applications had hit a record low of 200 in December 2023, against 2,000 in December 2022,  Xpheno said.

The current opportunities are spread across engineering, IT, operations, sales programs and project management functions, it said.

Top locations driving demand are Bengaluru (31 percent), Hyderabad (17 percent), Chennai (4 percent) and Delhi NCR (4 percent).

Global hiring

Globally too, open roles are inching a little over 40,000 at present – a number these companies saw back in 2021.

Prasadh MS, head of workforce research at Xpheno, said, “Earlier active job openings for India in a good season would be around 8,000-12,000 as big tech firms would also hire for future needs…While there are green shoots in India for this cohort, the recovery in terms of hiring numbers is still slower as compared to tech services companies.”

Sekhar Garisa, CEO, Foundit (formerly Monster) concurred. “Hiring for sure has picked up and this is all trickle-down effect. As we have seen with the IT services companies, they too are expecting Q2 to be a better quarter in terms of hiring, same is playing out for FAAMNG companies, he said.

For Garisa, this trend is mainly driven by a lot of big customers having restarted their digital transformation plans. “A lot of alternate sectors are driving this, be it manufacturing, retail or BFSI, which are providing a big push for digitisation. Now when that happens, both product and services tech companies will benefit from it.”

He believes that though there have been wide-scale layoffs and shelving or shutting down of several long-term futuristic projects by these global tech giants amidst economic slowdown, they have continued focused hiring for other projects.

A recent report by The Wall Street Journal suggests that since late 2022, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Meta and Amazon together have would have announced over 70,000 job cuts. But owing to selective hiring and M&As, there hasn’t been much change in the overall headcount of these companies between 2022 and 2023.

India to benefit most

According to Krishna Vij, business head-IT staffing at TeamLease Digital, in 2023, these major tech companies had reported an almost 90 percent reduction in hiring in India, due to macroeconomic challenges and global job cuts.

These companies are now shifting some of the overseas roles to India for cost optimisation and organisational restructuring, thereby increasing demand for professionals to fill replacement positions and also creating new opportunities in a growth-oriented market like India, Vij told Moneycontrol.

“Despite the slowdown, recruitment efforts across these companies are expected to increase over the next 2-3 years, focusing on expanding operations in India. Many of the new roles will be in AI, new-age technologies, data analytics and cloud platforms,” she said.

While global job cuts persist, opportunities in India are anticipated to grow due to this strategic shift towards AI-oriented projects and restructuring.

Garisa, however, added that hiring in India may not be necessarily linked to cost arbitrage for product companies like Microsoft or Google but more to get talent and build teams for the larger pieces of technology development work happening in the country.

Globally, the economic slowdown had led to companies like Microsoft and Meta shelving certain futuristic projects leading to the downsizing of teams.

For instance, as per media reports, Meta had laid off staff from its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon in October last year.

In January 2024, Microsoft said that it would trim 1,900 jobs in its video game unit.