HCL Announces Plans to Boost Global Workforce by Nearly 30,000 Employees

Indian IT services firm HCL Technologies has announced that it will add between 25,000 and 30,000 people to its global workforce in the current financial year, revealing that it has received 400 US work visas (H1B) this year.

“We applied for 640 H1B visas this year and got approval for nearly 400,” reported India’s financial daily The Economic Times, quoting Apparao, the company’s chief human resources (HR) officer.

The IT firm has not specified as to how many people it would hire in the United States, where its current headcount stands at 17,000 engineers.

Noida, India-based HCL has employed 127,875 globally, with more than 3000 of them added to the workforce in the second fiscal quarter of 2018 alone.

Apparao has stated that the company is no longer ‘heavily dependent’ on the US work visa as it is hiring American residents to fill up vacant positions. Considering the official’s comment, nearly 70% of the company’s employees in America are local citizens.

Rising visa cost and wages have been the drag on the balance sheet of most of the Indian IT services firms with large US operations, as the White House continues to tighten immigration laws.  However, the declining value of the rupee (Indian currency) is helping them offset the loss, for now.

HCL, for example, has reported US$356.7 million in net profit for July-September quarter, a 5.1% increase from the previous quarter.

The company saw incremental improvement in growth rates at key service segments, particularly engineering, R&D, and business services.