Why GCCs Are Hiring While IT Services Are Firing

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Why GCCs Are Hiring While IT Services Are Firing

Monday, 9:15 a.m., Bengaluru. In the glass atrium of a global bank’s GCC, badge scanners chirp like crickets after rain. A product owner is sketching a new flowsheet over coffee; a data platform team argues politely about lakehouse patterns. Across the road, an IT services tower is oddly quiet. Desks are clean. Monitors blink with “reassigned.” Same skyline, different weather.

GCC hiring trends 2025: demand signals you can’t ignore

India now anchors the world’s largest GCC ecosystem, well over 1,700 centers by FY2024, contributing ~$64.6B in revenue and employing ~1.9M people, with growth still compounding. nasscom

You can feel it in real estate too: Bengaluru and Hyderabad captured half of India’s tech office leasing in H1 2025, with analysts pointing directly to a GCC boom. The Times of India

Strategic intent is shifting: GCCs are evolving from “capability hubs” to value-creating organizations, expanding digital, analytics, and product mandates. EY

IT services layoffs in India: what’s driving the cuts

The other side of the street tells a harder story. Infosys posted its first full-year headcount decline in decades in FY2024, down ~26,000, a bellwether for a cooling demand cycle.

In 2025, TCS announced plans to reduce its workforce by ~2%, or around 12,000 roles, largely at middle and senior levels, citing skill mismatches and a new operating model as the industry resets.

Analysts frame it as a structural shift: slower mega-deals, cost pressure in North America, and a move from labor-intensive pyramids to leaner, specialist-heavy teams.

Breakdown of the key reasons behind IT services layoffs in India, the forces reshaping why IT services firms are cutting headcount while GCCs are still hiring:

1. Slowdown in Global Tech Spending

Enterprises in North America and Europe (the largest clients for Indian IT) are cutting discretionary IT budgets.
Cloud migrations, ERP upgrades, and digital transformation deals are being delayed or downsized.
This directly impacts services companies whose revenues depend on large outsourcing deals.

2. Shrinking “Mega Deals” and Longer Sales Cycles

Multi-year billion-dollar outsourcing deals are fewer.
Clients prefer smaller, modular contracts with faster ROI.
This makes the traditional IT services bench + pyramid model (large volumes of junior hires) unsustainable.

3. AI and Automation Cannibalizing Legacy Work

RPA, GenAI copilots, and cloud-native platforms are eliminating repetitive support and maintenance work, the bread and butter of services firms.
What once needed teams of 50 can now be managed by 5–10 with automation.
GCCs, however, are expanding AI teams to embed intelligence into products.

4. Pyramid Model Under Stress

IT services built their profitability on a broad base of junior employees and layers of middle management.
Clients now demand leaner, specialist-heavy teams with direct accountability.
This leads to layoffs, especially at the mid-senior levels where redundancy is highest.

5. Skill Mismatch

Talent pools in services firms are heavy on legacy skills (Java maintenance, ERP support, manual testing).
Demand has shifted to cloud-native, cybersecurity, AI/ML, product engineering, and platform thinking.
Instead of reskilling at scale, firms are cutting roles and rehiring selectively.

6. Margin Pressure & Cost Control

Global clients are squeezing vendors on pricing.
With revenue growth slowing, Indian IT majors (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL) are under pressure to protect double-digit margins.
Layoffs become the fastest lever to realign cost structures.

7. Geopolitical & Market Uncertainty

Inflation, interest rate hikes, and political uncertainty in the US/Europe are making enterprises cautious.
Services firms, being project-based and client-dependent, feel the squeeze first.
GCCs, by contrast, are captive investments tied to long-term product roadmaps, not quarterly IT budgets.

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Why GCCs are winning the talent war

Product engineering in GCCs: roadmaps, not tickets – CCs sit inside the business. They own code that ships to customers and platforms that drive revenue. The incentives reward cycle time, reliability, NPS, ARR not hours billed. That design naturally soaks up builders who think in releases, not rotas.
Cloud, data, and AI inside GCC mandates – From lakehouses to LLM guardrails, GCC charters increasingly include platform modernization, AI-assisted operations, and decision intelligence, work that compounds value and needs persistent teams, not transient benches. Industry trackers expect this shift to intensify as GCCs target innovation and knowledge-based capabilities.
Cybersecurity and risk: board-level priorities – Product-proximate security, model governance, zero-trust baselines, and regulatory readiness (PCI, SOX, GDPR, RBI, HIPAA) are must-have capabilities. GCCs build permanent control muscle, making security talent a non-discretionary hire.
Location momentum: Bengaluru/Hyderabad flywheel – Talent density plus high-quality office stock has created a feedback loop: more GCCs → deeper talent → more GCCs. H1 2025 leasing data shows the loop is still accelerating.

GCC hiring keywords 2025: roles you’ll actually see posted

Platform Engineering for multi-cloud foundations and golden paths.
Data & ML Engineering for governed lakehouses, MLOps, and real-time features.
AI Product & Applied Research for retrieval, safety, and model integration.
SecOps & AppSec for SDLC guardrails, secrets, SBOMs, and threat-led testing.
Product Management for outcomes, not outputs, OKRs tied to revenue or risk.

(Underlying economic truth: GCCs pay for repeatable value; IT services get paid for repeatable process. In a slow demand cycle, the process gets cut first.)

IT services vs GCCs: the org-design nobody talks about

Pyramid vs Diamond.
Legacy outsourcing optimized for cost and scale: many juniors, a few SMEs, a thin product spine. In 2025, clients want fewer, deeper experts, the diamond middle, which services firms must painfully resize to achieve. Reuters flagged this very workforce geometry pivot as India’s new IT playbook.

Projects vs Products.
Projects end; products compound. GCCs accrue institutional memory, domain, data, and design debt so the ROI per hire rises over time. That’s why they keep hiring through the cycle.

How to pivot from IT services to a GCC role (without losing your edge)

Translate projects into product impact. Replace “delivered 12 sprints” with “cut checkout latency 23%, lifted conversion 90 bps.” One line, measurable outcome, business noun.
Show platform thinking. If you built a pipeline, explain the platform: lineage, data contracts, golden tables, SLAs, cost per query, and the decisions it unlocked.
Prove governance fluency. Talk about security by default, SBOMs, least privilege, incident postmortems, and model risk controls. Hiring panels listen for this.
Tell a story of ownership. The strongest GCC resumes read like running diaries of responsibility: you broke it, you fixed it, you documented it, you made it cheaper.

Closing: Your next badge scan – Tomorrow morning another atrium will hum, another team will debate a schema change, another offer letter will hit an inbox. The two-speed economy isn’t a headline; it’s a hallway. If you’re ready to cross it, start by translating what you’ve done into business outcomes, leveling up one deep skill, and practicing ownership in public. The doors are open.