India's IT hiring stabilises in H1 FY26, campus intake improves: Adecco India

After several muted quarters, India's IT sector hiring stabilised in the first half of FY 2025-26 as hiring patterns improved, following a reasonable rise in the recruitment of freshers and mid-senior level professionals, HR solutions provider Adecco India said on Tuesday.

Campus intake has improved by 25 per cent compared to H1 FY25, with major IT players resuming engagements across key engineering and technical institutes, Adecco India Director and Business Head, Professional Staffing, Sanket Chengappa said.

The demand for engineering, technical and AI profiles has risen by 27 per cent, with compensation levels improving by 5 per cent compared to H1 FY25, he added.

These insights are based on the second quarter results of IT companies this financial year and analysis of talent demand across 50 clients of Adecco India.

Further, Chengappa said that most campus hires are being deployed across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and the National Capital Region, alongside a 7 per cent increase in placements across tier II cities, such as Coimbatore, Udaipur, Nagpur, Visakhapatnam and Indore.

"Companies are prioritising steady, manageable hiring to ensure freshers are deployed productively rather than remaining on the bench. Moving away from the traditional 'hire-and-train' model, many organisations are adopting a 'train-then-hire' approach by engaging with campuses earlier, aligning academic readiness with project requirements to minimise ramp-up time," Chengappa stated.

This, he said, marks a clear shift towards quality-led and demand-synced workforce planning as the industry continues to grapple with 45-50 per cent demand-supply mismatch across AI roles, cloud computing, cybersecurity, cross-domain engineers, MLOps engineers and data engineering.

"IT hiring sentiment remains in a phase of recalibration, which is cautious yet goal-oriented. Organisations are prioritising skill depth over scale, focusing on cloud, data, and AI-led capabilities while aligning workforce strength to active project pipelines. While campus hiring has picked up, the real challenge is to ensure that engineering talent is market-ready," Chengappa said.

He said lateral hiring continues to be shaped by deal pipelines and delivery mandates, as a lot of focus is on delivery leadership, domain specialists (cloud/data/AI), and cross-functional roles (DevOps, SRE, analytics leads) compared to generalists.

The focus is also shifting from large teams to smaller, high-impact, outcome-oriented leaders, he added.

"At Adecco, we are seeing a 42 per cent uptake in mid-to-senior level hiring, particularly across digital transformation and delivery leadership roles, and expect overall IT hiring momentum in the third quarter to stabilise at 45 per cent as deal conversions begin translating into active mandates," Chengappa said.

Overall, India's IT sector appears to be entering a phase of measured recovery as deal momentum is gradually improving with companies investing in sharper, skill-aligned hiring strategies that balance agility with depth.