Indian IT companies are poaching talent to hire overseas; Infosys is leading the race

Indian IT companies are doing anything to hire talent in overseas markets. To increase the headcount, they are poaching talent from rival companies.

In this poaching war, Infosys is leading the race as it hired 12 executives from Cognizant, 13 from Capgemini, 5 from TCS, and 8 each from Wipro, Accenture and IBM in the fiscal year ended March.

Infosys said it will hire 10, 000 people in the US in next two years and has ramped up its efforts to get best of talent in the industry.

"The talent arms race has started with gusto,” Phil Fersht, chief executive of IT consultancy HfS Research told ET.

"The race for talent is not new. We have always been competing for talent. But, yes, now we will need more talent onshore than in the past,” UB Pravin Rao, chief operating officer at Infosys, told ET last month.

Meanwhile, Cognizant will hire from campuses.

"We have been hiring technology and management from dozens of US campuses as well as from the lateral market. We have made a number of acquisitions and also rebadged employees from our customer organisations,” said Debashis Chatterjee, president, digital systems and technology, at Cognizant.