French 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, as it seeks to derive more value from its presence here.

The hiring will be evenly split between freshers and experienced professionals, or laterals, it’s country chief executive Ashwin Yardi told PTI.

The Indian workforce constitutes over half of its global employees base.

“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,” Yardi said.

At present, it is focusing efforts on re-skilling employees for the technologies of the future, he said, adding that this has now become a continuous process.

It has been found that youngsters under 30, who make up for over 65 per cent of its workforce, show a keenness to learn, he said, adding that it is conducting special programmes for the mid-level managers having 10-15 years of experience who would be placed as project managers or architects.

Yardi said there had not been any “restructuring or involuntary attrition” beyond the normal course of exits due to performance-related issues.

Clients have become more demanding, wherein employees have to be moved into a project on an immediate basis, Yardi said, adding that the utilisation levels have not been because the training and skilling activities take place alongside project work for an employee.

He said there is sufficient space at Airoli (near Mumbai), its biggest development centre, and also added that it had created capacity at other centres over the last two years which can accommodate the new joiners.

Applied innovation concept

At a time when some of its peers are laying a lot of stress on research and development activities and are filing for patents, the company has taken a call not to do ‘blue-sky thinking’ and adopt the “applied innovation” concept to come up with client-specific improvements, he said.

The company is also not keen to play on the product’s front and is happy being a services company, he said. It can be noted that many IT companies are focusing on products, and claim that it helps them maintain or widen profit margins.

The French company is also not investing in startups, unlike some peers.However, it is working jointly with over 150 of them on critical technologies, Yardi said.

He said the company believes in offering an entire bouquet of services to a client to meet the whole spectrum of needs and discloses the work done by a startup to the client.

It has also hired a chief innovation officer from a startup recently, he said.

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