120% Salary Hike For Indian IT Employees In 2022? Here’s The Shocking Truth!

In order to retain specialised talent, IT firms in India may hike salaries or counter offers by 60-120% next year.

Roles In Demand

The hikes will be offered to those with niche tech skills which are in high demand.

Some of those roles include full stack engineers, data scientists, data engineers and backend engineers.

This war of wages has shifted negotiating power back to the candidates since the demand for their skills has increased their valuation and consequently their remuneration.

The demand for digital talent is fueled by a number of factors. 

Factors Behind Talent War

One is that more GCCs (global capability centres) are setting up offices in India.

More startups are receiving funding which they use to rope in talent.

IT services companies are thriving as they win more and more deals, leading to a demand for talent to help execute them.

Startups Raising The Bar

Startups are the biggest draw for IT talent at the moment, since they are more likely to give a 50-120% hike in offers and counter offers, depending on the role.

IT services firms and GCCs cannot compete and can only offer hikes in the range of 5-14% for the same skills.

Hiring will further gain pace with increased investment in artificial intelligence, cloud, security, and engineering.

New Tech Skills In Demand In 2022

New tech trends have emerged this year which will further generate talent demand such as metaverse, cybersecurity mesh, data fabric, cloud-native platforms, hyper-automation and privacy-enhancing computation.

The demand will likely continue unabated into 2022 until firms create their own organic talent pool and upskill workers.

What Firms Can Do

These things will take time, typically 6-8 quarters before any results will show.

Some of the things companies can do to increase their appeal to the talent they seek is build a progressive work culture, provide exciting career growth opportunities, and emphasize job meaningfulness.