
According to media reports, the four audit & consulting professional services firms Deloitte, PWC, EY, and KPMG are on a hiring spree in India.
According to estimates by top company officials and industry insiders, the consulting companies and their shared services units in India are likely to hire nearly 80,000 people in the next 12 months. The increasing demand is due to business growth and high attrition.
The rapid technology adoption post-pandemic is the reason behind the high demand for consulting services as the companies are trying to navigate the technology change.
According to industry estimates, these four companies and their subsidiaries in India currently have over 210,000 people in tech and non-tech functions and they are likely to double the headcount in the next 2-3 years.
There are primarily two growth drivers for these firms. Firstly, the digital transformation services when companies rushed to create additional digital infrastructure during the Covid pandemic. The other is expansion in their global business, resulting in the addition of shared services units in India.
Gross hiring for these companies stood at 88,000 for the fiscal year, including the headcount refill due to an annual attrition rate of about 23%, showed the data. This was the highest year-on-year headcount growth of 36% in this cohort of companies.
Deloitte
SV Nathan, Partner & Chief Talent Officer, Deloitte India said, “Deloitte, as well as others in this sector, have gone into technology consulting in a big way which requires a lot of people and that is what is triggering the huge demand for manpower.”
He added, “We are hiring across all our businesses. The economic resurrection post-Covid is what is propelling a fair amount of the hiring.”
The company is hiring freshers from campuses as well as relevant talent from across industries. That 20% of the firm’s global workforce was based out of India with the headcount here crossing 90,000 across functions.
PwC India
According to reports, PwC India added 3,000 jobs last year in line. It is now planning to create 10,000 additional jobs in the country over a five-year period.
Padmaja Alaganandan, Chief People Officer, PwC India said that this is a part of the company’s new strategy.
She said, “Our talent strategy is focused on what we see as the requirements of the market and our clients, with a balance on internally building and lateral hiring for these capabilities.”
EY and KPMG did not respond to media queries.
The technical roles include core development, DevOps, Cybersecurity, Cloud Tech, Mobility, Virtualisation, Data Science, and Analytics.
In the non-tech jobs, the roles in demand are process & functional advisory, business analysts, finance specialists, accounting & audit specialists, business operations consulting, forensics, and risk advisory.