India hiring rebounds, but gaps remain
Business Today reports Tata Consultancy Services has already issued 25,000 fresher offers for FY27, part of a broader rise in white‑collar hiring in India even as employers warn about an employability gap among graduates. The coverage notes universities face pressure to make students job‑ready by improving practical skills, research exposure and entrepreneurship training. (businesstoday.in) (economictimes.indiatimes.com)
Tata Consultancy Services has issued 25,000 fresher offers for financial year 2027, signaling that campus hiring in India is picking up again. (businesstoday.in) Chief executive K Krithivasan said more hiring will depend on demand, and the company is not shifting toward a more lateral-hiring-heavy model. Livemint reported the 25,000 offers are below the 44,000 freshers Tata Consultancy Services hired in financial year 2026. (livemint.com) The broader market has also improved. Naukri JobSpeak said India’s white-collar hiring rose 9% year over year in March 2026, taking full-year growth in financial year 2026 to 8%, up from 2% in financial year 2025. (naukri.com) That rebound has been uneven across sectors. Naukri said information technology hiring was flat in March, while hospitality grew 21%, business process outsourcing and information technology enabled services grew 18%, and education grew 15%. (naukri.com) Entry-level demand has risen too, but employers are still filtering hard for specific skills. Naukri said fresher hiring for candidates with zero to three years of experience grew 16% year over year in March, while artificial intelligence and machine learning hiring rose 37%. (naukri.com) The bottleneck is employability, not the number of degrees. Mercer and Mettl said overall employability among Indian graduates fell to 42.6% in 2024 from 44.3% in 2023, based on assessments of more than 1 million students across 2,700 campuses. (mercer.com, financialexpress.com) Mercer and Mettl said soft skills employability was 50%, while learning agility was 46%, underscoring gaps in workplace readiness beyond technical knowledge alone. (mercer.com) The pressure is now shifting to universities to make courses more job-linked. The Economic Times spotlighted Vivekananda Global University in Jaipur, which said it is building research projects, startup incubation and cross-disciplinary coursework into degree programs to improve job readiness. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) India is producing more hiring signals than it did a year ago, but companies are still hiring against a narrower skills checklist. That leaves the next phase of the rebound tied not just to demand, but to whether colleges can send graduates into interviews with usable skills on day one. (businesstoday.in, naukri.com, mercer.com)
