India's information technology sector is witnessing a significant shift in hiring patterns, with mid-sized companies emerging as the dominant employment generators for the third consecutive year. According to industry experts, these agile firms are projected to outpace their larger counterparts in recruitment during the current fiscal year.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Recent data reveals a compelling trend in the IT employment landscape. Eight mid-tier IT companies added 7,802 employees during the April-September 2025 period, significantly outperforming the large-cap firms that managed only 3,097 hires during the same timeframe. This performance becomes even more impressive when compared to previous years - the same group of companies had added 16,583 people in the first half of fiscal 2025 and 1,860 in the first half of the previous fiscal.
The contrast with India's Big Five IT companies - Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL Technologies, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra - is striking. These industry giants cumulatively added 11,171 employees in the first half of FY25 after cutting headcount by 40,744 in H1FY24. This pattern continues from the last two fiscals, where mid-caps consistently added more employees in absolute numbers.
Why Mid-Sized Companies Are Winning
Industry experts point to several factors driving this hiring surge among mid-tier IT firms. According to Neeti Sharma, chief executive of TeamLease Digital, "mid-sized companies have been more active in hiring due to their flexibility in taking shorter term projects, agility and strong presence in fast-growing areas like digital and BFSI."
Ashutosh Sharma, vice-president and research director at Forrester Research, echoes this sentiment, noting that "mid-caps usually have better resource efficiency and with rising clients demand for cloud, AI and analytics talent combined with smaller deal size provides a favorable environment for them to grow headcount."
Meanwhile, larger IT companies are focusing more on digitization, reskilling, and productivity improvement rather than just adding headcount. Their growth challenges are forcing them to optimize utilization, which directly impacts their hiring numbers.
Fresh Graduates Find New Opportunities
The hiring trend brings particularly good news for fresh graduates. TeamLease data indicates that most of the increase in mid-caps hiring last year came from higher fresher addition in roles including AI engineers, data analysts, and cybersecurity positions.
While large IT firms added 2,100 freshers incrementally, the smaller peers added 2,400 graduates - a significant difference that offers hope for the 1.5 million students graduating from engineering colleges every year.
Companies like LTIMindtree have explicitly stated their commitment to fresher hiring. Vipul Chandra, chief financial officer of LTIMindtree, confirmed during the company's post-earnings press conference on 16 October that "our fresher hiring program that we are remaining committed to and under which we hired more than 2,600 freshers in this quarter, will start playing out once they get trained and they start getting deployed."
The projections for FY26 indicate that mid-tier tech services companies are expected to hire about 16,000 employees, marginally more than the Big Five's anticipated 15,400 hires. This represents approximately 6% growth for mid-caps compared to just 1% for large caps.
This hiring momentum aligns with revenue growth projections, as mid-cap IT services companies are expected to grow their revenues faster than the Big Five for the second straight year. The top five ended the first half of FY26 with revenue between $3 billion and $15 billion, while the mid-caps ended the half-year with revenue between $524 million and $2.3 billion.
