575 small firms hiring employees laid off by tech giants: Report

India third in global tech-hiring geographies; USA and European Union lead

Some 575 smaller technology companies worldwide are hiring for various job roles dropped during downsizing by industry giants, said a report on Monday.

Last year, more than 1000 firms around the world laid off over 154,000 workers. The trend continued in January 2023, when some 220 companies reportedly sacked more than 68,000 tech workers. Recruitment agencies have reported hiring by IT services companies is down 70 per cent year-on-year.

The job crunch has prompted companies that can’t compete with big tech to target laid-off tech workers, said the report by pre-hire skill assessment provider Xobin. The report is based on a study of "multiple" tech companies around the globe. The survey was conducted between January 20 and January 29 and incorporates job posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The companies are hiring for roles like development operations (DevOps), cloud management, data engineering, site reliability, and security. Three in five companies with open positions in product development are hiring full-stack developers and backend developers across web app and mobile app development. Data analysts and engineers are next in demand. Information security and site-reliability roles aren’t that popular.

The USA remains the biggest employer, making 32.9 per cent of global tech hiring. It is followed by the European Union (9.15 per cent). India stands third in the global tech-hiring geographies, having a share of 8.43 per cent. Around 17 per cent of the companies studied were open to remote hiring and 9.58 per cent were going for remote hiring in the US alone.

Over a quarter of the tech hiring now comes from engineering and software development roles. The other domains for tech hiring included sales (13.4 per cent), marketing (9.45 per cent), human resources (9.09 per cent), customer success (7.47 per cent), finance (6.07 per cent), operations (4.74 per cent) and design (3.41 per cent). Software development roles accounted for 59.4 per cent of all technology development hires.

“The take-home of the survey is that not everything is as bad in the IT/tech recruitment scenario as projected out there. The skilled tech workers will find ample opportunities to find a new job,” said Guruprakash Sivabalan, chief executive officer of Chennai-based Xobin.

“Many of the recent tech lay-offs are as a result of imitative behaviour. Even if there have been lay-offs by a few big tech companies, there have been big tech companies that have seen no down-sizing in their workforce, with some vowing there will be none in the immediate future,” he said.