More than half of India's Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are preparing to grow their headcount in fiscal year 2027, with 52 per cent of centres surveyed planning workforce expansion, according to a report released on Tuesday, 25 August. The findings, from talent fulfilment partner Taggd in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), signal a continued but increasingly selective hiring push across the GCC sector.

Hiring Outlook for FY27

While the majority of GCCs are in growth mode, the picture is not uniform. 22 per cent of centres expect hiring to remain stable in FY27, while 26 per cent anticipate workforce reductions. The divergence suggests a sector recalibrating rather than simply scaling — with precision hiring replacing the broad-based intake that characterised earlier growth cycles.

Early-career professionals dominate the anticipated hiring mix. Freshers account for 16 per cent of expected hires, while professionals with one to five years of experience represent 30 per cent — together making up 46 per cent of total projected hiring. This skew toward younger talent reflects both cost considerations and the sector's appetite for profiles that can be trained on emerging technologies from the ground up.

External Hiring Remains the Dominant Channel

External recruitment continues to be the primary route for GCC talent acquisition, accounting for 78 per cent of hires. Internal capability development fills the remaining 22 per cent. Among external hires, IT services firms remain the largest talent source at 41 per cent, followed by other GCCs at 32 per cent and startups and product companies at 27 per cent.

This pipeline concentration carries risk: as GCCs compete for the same IT-services talent pool, compensation pressure and candidate availability have emerged as secondary hiring constraints, the report noted. Quality mismatch, however, ranked as the leading primary hiring challenge.

AI Skills Define the New Hiring Imperative

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the GCC talent brief at speed. Nearly half of GCCs surveyed said more than a quarter of their open roles require AI-related capabilities, while one in four centres report that the majority of their positions are already AI-adjacent. AI and GenAI emerged as the leading skill cluster in demand, followed by data science, DevOps, engineering, and full-stack development.

Devashish Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of Taggd, said: 'GCCs are driving India's next phase of global leadership, but the rules of engagement are shifting. Our research with CII confirms that FY27 growth will be defined by precision rather than sheer volume. As AI integrates across every function, the GCCs that lead tomorrow will be those that transition from broad-based intake to targeted, skill-first capability building.'

Execution Gaps Persist Despite Improved Conversion

Offer-to-join conversion rates have improved to approximately 80 per cent, a positive signal for GCC talent teams. However, 48 per cent of critical GCC roles still take more than 60 days to fill — a bottleneck that could constrain the sector's ability to meet its own FY27 growth targets.

This comes amid a broader structural shift in India's technology employment landscape, where GCCs — now numbering over 1,700 centres — have become a major alternative to traditional IT services firms for high-skill roles. With AI capability increasingly non-negotiable, the centres that build training pipelines alongside external hiring are likely to pull ahead in the next hiring cycle.