New Delhi, Oct 22 (IANS) India’s IT hiring landscape in the first half of this fiscal (H1 FY26) reflects a period of steady recalibration as technology firms’ campus intake has improved by 25 per cent compared to H1 FY25, with major IT players resuming engagements across key engineering and technical institutes, data from a report showed on Wednesday.

Demand for engineering, technical and AI profiles has risen by 27 per cent during the period, with compensation levels improving by 5 per cent compared to H1 FY25.

“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-2 cities such as Coimbatore, Udaipur, Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, and Indore,” Adecco Group, a talent and technology expertise company, said in its report.

Companies are prioritising steady, manageable hiring to ensure freshers are deployed productively rather than remaining on the bench.

According to the report, 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.

“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,” said Sanketh Chengappa, Director and Business Head, Professional Staffing, Adecco India.

To address the same, “we have been actively working with IT companies, educational institutions, and government bodies to deliver tailored up-skilling and re-skilling solutions,” Chengappa added.

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

Meanwhile, lateral hiring continues to be shaped by deal pipelines and delivery mandates.

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, the report stated.

–IANS

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