Tech major Capgemini, which employs close to 1.15 lakh people in India, is looking to hire up to 30,000 employees in the country this year, in a bid to derive more value from its presence here. Currently, the Indian workforce constitutes for over half of its global employees base.

The hiring will be evenly split between freshers and experienced professionals, or lateral hires, revealed the company's country chief executive Ashwin Yardi. Earlier, the firm had announced that it is looking to hire 12,000 to 15,000 freshers this year through college campus recruitment, who are expected to join the firm in 2021.

Yardi stated, “India forms a very important part of our business and we will hire 25,000-30,000 people here this year on a gross basis.”

At present, it is focusing efforts on reskilling employees for the technologies of the future, he said, adding that this has now become a continuous process. Yardi revealed that the tech firm is conducting special programs for the mid-level managers having 10-15 years of experience who would be placed as project managers or architects.

Yardi added that there is sufficient space at Airoli (near Mumbai), its biggest development center, and has also created capacity at other centers over the last two years which can accommodate the new joinees.

In addition, the company is also betting big on 5G technologies and has set up two labs-in Paris and Mumbai- in order to capture the opportunities emerging in the field of telecom and industrial IoT. In this direction, Capgemini has hired Airtel's Monica Gupta as Vice President to spearhead its 5G and communication technologies business. 

Capgemini is not alone in announcing major hiring plans for India. Recently, with the backdrop of a major structural change with layoffs and cost-cutting that lasted most of last year, US-listed IT firm Cognizant is also planning to hire again. With plans of hiring more than 20,000 digitally-skilled tech graduates in 2020, the American IT multinational giant is scaling up in India.