More than half of GCCs signal increased hiring in FY27: Report

The hiring outlook among global capability centres (GCCs) in India remains positive for FY27, although the focus is shifting towards hiring quality professionals rather than pursuing volume-led growth, according to a report.

The annual GCC survey by Taggd, in partnership with CII, titled From Intent to Predictable Scale: The Future of GCCs in India, found that 52% of GCCs plan to expand their workforce in FY27, up from 47% in the previous fiscal year.

According to the survey, India now has 2,117 GCC units employing 23 lakh professionals and generating Rs 9.4 lakh crore in revenue. The country also accounts for more than 50% of global GCC activity, the report said.

However, current hiring trends reveal a dichotomy. While 101 new GCCs were established in India in 2025, creating 1.5 lakh jobs, around 5,500-6,000 roles were also lost during the year.

The report describes this as a restructuring of the GCC landscape, with centres anchored primarily on cost arbitrage contracting, while those investing in talent depth, capability-led hiring and evolving mandates continue to expand.

Despite this hiring momentum, the quality mismatch remains the most cited hiring constraint as only 42.6% of graduates meet industry employability standards. The report said offer-to join conversion has improved to ~80%, a meaningful gain, but the funnel still leaks at every stage for the wrong reasons.

Hiring by GCCs is now being governed by budget, forecast, and capability roadmaps rather than backfill urgency.

This shift in hiring is also repricing the compensation structure as GCCs are now the highest-paying segment in India’s technology labour market, with projected increments of 10.4% for 2026. Though, ER&D functions are witnessing salary increases in double digits while non-ER&D functions are in mid single digits.

AI adoption in hiring has crossed 90% of GCCs, but adoption and impact are not the same thing. A quarter of adopters still cannot quantify returns, and the reason is structural: most GCCs have deployed AI stage by stage, with each tool solving its own slice of the funnel in isolation. The intelligence each stage generates doesn’t carry forward. Individual tasks get faster; the system as a whole doesn’t get smarter.

The report noted that the GCC story is no longer about whether India can scale. It is about whether the systems behind that scale, hiring, compensation, skilling, quality, technology, compliance, governance, are engineered for predictability.