After layoffs, good news for India’s IT sector! Companies start hiring freshers and…, campus recruitment rises by…

After several subdued quarters, hiring in India’s IT sector showed signs of stabilisation in the first half of FY2025-26, driven by renewed demand for freshers and mid-senior professionals, HR solutions firm Adecco India said on Tuesday.

Campus recruitment rose 25% year-on-year, with leading IT firms re-engaging with major engineering and technical institutes, according to Sanket Chengappa, Director and Business Head Professional Staffing at Adecco India.

IT Sector Jobs Hiring

Demand for engineering, technical, and AI-related roles climbed 27%, accompanied by a 5% increase in compensation levels compared to the same period last year.

The findings are based on the Q2 performance of IT companies and Adecco India’s analysis of talent trends across 50 client organisations.

Further, Chengappa said that most campus hires are being deployed across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and the National Capital Region, alongside a 7 per cent increase in placements across tier II cities, such as Coimbatore, Udaipur, Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, and Indore.

“Companies are prioritising steady, manageable hiring to ensure freshers are deployed productively rather than remaining on the bench. Moving away from the traditional ‘hire-and-train’ model, many organisations are adopting a ‘train-then-hire’ approach by engaging with campuses earlier, aligning academic readiness with project requirements to minimise ramp-up time,” Chengappa stated.

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This, he said, marks a clear shift towards quality-led and demand-synced workforce planning as the industry continues to grapple with 45-50 per cent demand-supply mismatch across AI roles, cloud computing, cybersecurity, cross-domain engineers, MLOps engineers and data engineering.

“IT hiring sentiment remains in a phase of recalibration, which is cautious yet goal-oriented. Organisations are prioritising skill depth over scale, focusing on cloud, data, and AI-led capabilities while aligning workforce strength to active project pipelines. While campus hiring has picked up, the real challenge is to ensure that engineering talent is market-ready,” Chengappa said.

He said lateral hiring continues to be shaped by deal pipelines and delivery mandates, as a lot of focus is on delivery leadership, domain specialists (cloud/data/AI), and cross-functional roles (DevOps, SRE, analytics leads) compared to generalists.

The focus is also shifting from large teams to smaller, high-impact, outcome-oriented leaders, he added.

“At Adecco, we are seeing a 42 per cent uptake in mid-to-senior level hiring, particularly across digital transformation and delivery leadership roles, and expect overall IT hiring momentum in the third quarter to stabilise at 45 per cent as deal conversions begin translating into active mandates,” Chengappa said.

(With Inputs From PTI)

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