Global chills are giving tech hiring the shivers

Tech giants Alphabet-owned Google, Microsoft, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms and Twitter are all now either slowing down their hiring or trimming their staff count amid global pressures such as a looming recession in the US, a downtown in the markets, a supply chain crisis and political instabilities around the world. 

Geopolitical tensions have escalated lately with the resignation of scandal-hit British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the fleeing of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa after the island nation’s economy collapsed, even as the long ensuing Russia-Ukraine war continues.  

Google parent Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai informed employees in an email on Tuesday that the company would be “slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities.” The memo clarified that the company isn’t freezing hiring entirely, but it will hire for “engineering, technical and other critical roles”. 

Just a few days ago, Microsoft said it will be slashing a number of roles, affecting less than 1 per cent of its total workforce as part of a regular adjustment at the start of its fiscal year, but added that the company’s overall workforce will still rise in the coming year. 

Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal, in May this year, had announced a pause on most hiring and backfills and said the microblogging company may rescind some job offers, Wall Street Journal had reported on the basis of an internal memo. But the firm, which has kicked off a legal battle with billionaire Elon Musk for going back on his decision to buy it for $44 billion, ruled out company-wide layoffs.  

Just a week before Twitter, Facebook parent Meta Platforms also announced it was slowing its pace of hiring after posting its slowest revenue growth in the April quarter since going public a decade ago.  The company reportedly intended to stop hiring for mid- and senior-level roles.  

Meanwhile in India, too, hiring by IT firms, one of the largest recruiters of white-collar employees in the country, have normalised compared to last year’s raging tech talent war. The country’s largest software services provider TCS added 14,136 new recruits in the June quarter compared to the average quarterly hiring of 26,000 in FY22. Noida-based HCL Technologies hired 2,089 new employees in Q1 compared to the 9,600 they took in on an average each quarter last year.  

The top five IT majors in India -- TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and TechM – hired more than 2.7 lakh employees on a net basis in 2021-22. The top four of them alone hired 2.2 lakh freshers during the year and plan to hire 1.6 lakh freshers in the current financial year. Meanwhile, their attrition rates are still at record-high 20-percent-plus-levels. 

The IT industry talent war of 2021 also boosted the demand and salaries across industries as they ramped up their in-house tech capabilities. Largest private lender HDFC Bank, for instance, is noticing sanity returning to the tech talent market since April 2022 in terms of salaries and joining bonuses. “Six months back, it was absolutely crazy in terms of unreasonable demands and opportunistic behaviour on the part of potential candidates who were accepting offers and then dropping out. But we have seen a betterment on all these dimensions in the past 6-8 weeks,” CHRO Vinay Razdan had told Business Today in May 2022.