Staffing Issues: Indian IT Services Giants Seek U.S. Staff

In the 1990s, Japanese carmakers including Honda, Nissan and Toyota rapidly added American employees to their workforce. Now Indian IT services companies are following suit in order to hire top talent globally and better integrate into the U.S. corporate landscape. While they’re mainly adding employees in the United States, these firms are also sending an increasing number of new hires to do extended stints in India.

For people like Andy Keyser, previously CIO for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, the trend creates opportunities for broader business exposure and the chance to join a fast-growing organization. Keyser, who continues to live in the United States, now heads the government practice of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company. “It is a very flat organization,” Keyser says, compared with the complex organization charts of most American IT services companies.

Headquartered in Mumbai, TCS already employs 600 Americans—and expects to add another 1,000 staffers across its 50 offices in the United States within a year, says Surya Kant, president of TCS America. In particular, TCS seeks business consultants, software engineers and new MBAs for its financial services, health-care, media and government practices.

Indian IT services company Infosys has an aggressive U.S. college recruitment program in place, says Bikramjit Maitra, VP and head of human resources. “We visited 61 engineering and liberal arts colleges across the U.S. and plan to have 300 new hires join us shortly,” Maitra says. Most new U.S. hires spend four months training in Mysore, India, about 100 miles from Infosys headquarters in Bangalore.

Partly due to the chance for quick career advancement, Indian IT services firms are luring recruits such as 23-year-old Scott Stapleton, who went to Infosys’s Bangalore headquarters after graduating from Georgetown University. “The future of the global economy is transnational jobs like mine,” he says.