Share with your CHRO
India’s tech hiring market is splitting in two, and the gap is widening fast. Demand for tech workers overall grew 10% year-on-year, yet entry-level IT roles fell 25% over the same period, per a foundit report. AI-related roles now account for 4% of fresher hiring, up from 1% a year ago, but the growth story belongs to the 7-to-10-year experience band, the only tenure cohort posting gains, up 11% annually. Traditional IT firms shed share of fresher hiring from 32% to 24%, as banks, manufacturers, and global capability centres absorbed the demand instead.
What this means for your business
If your graduate hiring pipeline runs through a traditional IT services partner, the structural shift here is already eating into that supply. The real exposure isn’t a talent shortage in aggregate, it’s a misalignment between where degrees are entering the market and where your open roles actually sit. Companies building AI operations functions, meaning teams that validate, tune, and govern AI outputs rather than build models from scratch, are competing for a thin, expensive slice of the 7-to-10-year band rather than growing their own bench from entry level.
The foundit data, shaped by a job platform that benefits from activity at both ends of the hiring market, still points at something structurally real. The IT occupation index rising 10% while the IT industry index fell 6% is not a rounding error, it’s the signal that tech work has decoupled from tech firms as the primary employer. Healthcare added the most fresher-hiring share of any function, jumping from 7% to 11%. That matters because it tells you the competition for junior technical talent is no longer confined to your direct industry peers. A pharmaceutical company or a regional bank is now bidding for the same STEM graduate you are.
The CHROs who come out ahead here are the ones who treat the current dip in fresher IT hiring as a buying opportunity rather than a green light to pause graduate programs. The experienced-hire market for AI-adjacent skills is already pricing in scarcity, and every year a company skips its graduate cohort, it defers the pipeline that would otherwise reduce that dependence by 2028 or 2029. I’d revise this position if fresher AI-role share stalls below 5% for another two consecutive years, which would suggest employers have genuinely decided they’d rather buy experience than build it. Until then, pausing graduate hiring to chase mid-career talent is borrowing against a cost curve that only gets steeper.
Based on reporting from Indian IT Sector Experiences 10% Annual Growth in Tech Recruitment, ETHRWorld, originally published 2026-08-06 09:35:00.
