The GCC Boom in India: Why Talent Quality Will Make or Break Your Expansion

The growth of global capability centers (GCCs) in India has exploded over the past few years. Hiring targets for 2024 were more than double that of the U.S., with an average of 790 open roles in India. This represents a 19% year-over-year increase. Real estate is also becoming impossible to find in GCC hubs such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune. While global enterprises and large tech companies have historically driven GCC development, first-time entrants and mid-sized companies are now the primary growth drivers. 

The fierce war for talent has created pressing challenges that talent and engineering leaders are grappling with. The quality of talent entering GCCs is not keeping pace with the speed and scale at which organizations are hiring. 

“Talent quality—whether among fresh graduates or mid-career professionals—continues to be a major challenge for GCCs building capability at scale. India produces a large volume of graduates, but many still enter the workforce without industry-ready skills, practical exposure, or the problem-solving mindset needed for global organizations. On the lateral side, frequent job switches, limited up-skilling, and early promotions have created noticeable gaps in depth and execution maturity. The result is a talent pool where titles often look strong on paper, but the hands-on capability and leadership readiness required for global-standard work are not always consistent,” explained Prakash Bodla, Founder and CEO of aAROHAN Consulting. 

In the rush to hire, companies meet their headcount targets but later discover the long-term costs of this talent quality challenge. This outcome is avoidable, but only if the hiring process is built with structure from the beginning.

The Talent Quality Problem No One Talks About – Until It’s Too Late

For years, companies leveraged large IT service providers to establish their presence in India. These providers would: 

• Hire employees on their payroll. 
• Ring-fence them to work for the GCC.
• Eventually, transfer hires to the company’s payroll. 

The primary challenge with this approach is that the company doesn’t have any control over talent quality. 

Over the last few years, companies have increasingly partnered with staffing firms to set up and scale GCCs. These talent partners:

• Help source, interview, and hire talent.
• Simplify global operations by integrating workforce, HR, workspace, and compliance across premier talent hubs. 

However, they struggle with talent quality, benchmarking, and consistent interviewing. 

Traditional staffing partners are structured around volume, not quality. Recruiters typically earn 8% to 12% of each hire’s annual salary. The more seats filled, the better their payout. 

India remains one of the world’s best engineering markets, so why is there a talent quality problem? There are three forces that are contributing to this.

1. Volume-Driven Incentives at Staffing Partners

Hiring is a numbers game, where the quality problem starts at the top of the funnel and trickles down. 

• Recruiters bring in as many candidates as needed to fill the role, regardless of how well the candidate aligns with the role or company culture. 
• Candidates are poorly or inconsistently evaluated. 
• Inefficiencies add up, hiring cycles are wasted, and there are poor onsite-to-offer ratios. 

Companies may fill their open roles but sacrifice quality, ultimately resulting in performance issues and churn. 

What makes this worse is that many GCCs are increasingly dependent on agencies for their first 50, 100, or 200 hires. If those foundational hires don’t meet the bar, the entire GCC is destined to struggle. 

“A recent GCC that started operations outsourced their hiring. They were able to meet their growth target of 300 hires in 9 months. However, their India GCC leader recently expressed frustration that they will have to reskill or let go at least half of those hires. That is a pretty significant cost,” described Tanuj Vohra, former India GCC lead at Broadcom and IBM.

2. Inexperienced Recruiters Screening Engineering Talent 

Most of these staffing firms rely on junior recruiters who lack experience in sourcing and evaluating top engineering talent. They struggle to: 

• Separate signal from noise.
• Identify which candidates can truly operate at a high technical bar.
• Distinguish between a resume that looks good from one that reflects proven capabilities. 

This leads to:

• Superficial screening
• Missed top-tier talent
• Engineering time wasted on weak candidates
• Hiring decisions driven by speed rather than skill

3. Rushed Cycles in a Fast-Moving Market

The rush to hire, combined with the finite pool of skilled engineers, means compressed hiring cycles are the norm. In India’s fast-moving market, a strong candidate’s resume only stays in the market for an average of 7 to 10 days before they have an offer in hand. Companies need to assess talent quickly and close on the position before candidates start “shopping” for other roles. 

GCCs also face immense pressure to fill hundreds of roles, sometimes with hiring sprints that last only weeks or months. For the first few months of a GCC’s operations in India, they typically fly a team of 5 to 6 interviewers into India once a month. Interviews are batched up and conducted in one gruelling week while interviewers are there. With this process, interviewers and candidates burn out. Hiring standards slip, speed is prioritized over quality, and candidates can’t perform at their best. 

Overall, rushed hiring means: 

• Less time for thorough vetting, deeper interviews, or calibration of candidate skills 
• Suboptimal hiring decisions
• Wasted resources
• Hiring that doesn’t support long-term growth or innovation

Talent Quality Matters More Than Ever: AI is Amplifying the Gap

The stakes have never been higher. AI is rapidly reshaping engineering, amplifying the gap between top performers and their peers. The strongest engineers are using AI to produce outsized value. Karat data shows that 73% of tech leaders say strong engineers are now worth at least 3x their total compensation, while 59% say weak engineers deliver net zero or negative value.

This widening gap means the cost of mediocre or low-quality hires compounds and actively destroys value. 

How Leading Teams Achieve Velocity and Talent Quality With Precision

It’s apparent that traditional hiring approaches aren’t keeping pace with the scale and velocity required by GCCs. Slowing down hiring or decreasing open roles are potential solutions, but neither is the answer. Instead, it’s fixing rushed, inconsistent processes that lack measurement. This allows companies to achieve quality, speed, and scale all at the same time. 

Practices such as standardized interviews, calibrated benchmarks, and data-driven evaluation make it possible to run fast, efficient hiring processes that also yield high-quality hires. Companies that adopt these tools and methods are able to accurately identify candidates who meet their hiring bar without slowing down hiring. 

We’re also increasingly seeing companies rely on specialized talent firms such as Karat, in addition to working with a partner for global operations, workspace, and support. Specialized firms bring several strengths:

• Calibrated technical assessment: Karat uses interview content that’s been thoroughly researched and tested to generate a predictive hiring signal. 
• 24/7 interviewing: With a global network of Interview Engineers, Karat allows candidates to interview on their preferred schedule. This means you can schedule same-day interviews to maintain velocity without burning out your internal teams.
• Experienced interviewers: Karat Interview Engineers are experienced and trained to objectively evaluate candidates, ensuring consistency and increasing hiring confidence.
• Data-driven insights: Karat turns your hiring process into data, giving you visibility into sourcing partner effectiveness, pass-through rates, the quality of your pipeline, and more. 

An area that benefits most from this new approach is sourcing. Recently, a global payments enterprise based in London faced this challenge when setting up its first GCC in Hyderabad. Their India team was struggling to evaluate candidates thoroughly while keeping up with their rapid hiring needs. Screening alone could take multiple weeks, making it difficult to secure top talent.

By partnering with Karat, the company was able to accelerate screening and evaluation without compromising on quality. Karat provided: 

• Consistent interviews that were tailored to the organization’s hiring criteria.
• 24/7, on-demand interviews that engaged top talent and expedited the process.
• A clear hiring bar that helped the organization hone in on top candidates.
• Regular insights and feedback loops that enabled real-time refinement.

The results were significant:

• 89% of onsite candidates received offers.
• Average screening time dropped from 3 weeks to 3 days.
• 100% of hires met the enterprise’s technical hiring bar.

With Karat’s structured approach, the firm has not only built its GCC engineering foundation quickly, efficiently, and with top-tier talent, but it has also established a hiring process that will scale as the company continues to expand in India. 

Actionable Takeaways

To ensure quality doesn’t erode as you start up and scale your GCC, you need to build a strong hiring process rooted in measurement and consistency.

Establish Your Hiring Bar

“The first 50 to 100 hires that you make in India define your culture and likelihood of being successful with GCC long-term. As such, it is critical to establish a global bar, and hire the best talent possible initially,” advised Vohra. 

To establish your hiring bar, define the required technical and behavioral competencies and use industry benchmarks to determine the level of skill and proficiency needed. 

For the most part, your standards and benchmarks need to be global in order to see success, but there are some areas where you can be more flexible to account for the local market. An example is offering candidates a “redo” option. This allows a candidate to take the interview again within 24 hours, giving them an opportunity to improve if there was an interruption or if they didn’t feel ready in their initial interview. 

Once you’ve set your hiring bar, it’s important to apply it consistently across all candidates. This may sound obvious, but in practice, the pressure to fill a large number of open roles often causes companies to lower their standards.

Use Standardized Interviews

Identify the specific technical competencies required for each role, focusing on what truly matters for on-the-job success. Then, build your interviews to evaluate candidates on those competencies. The best interview questions are predictable, fair, and enjoyable for candidates. 

Interviews also have to incorporate the use of AI/LLMs. The role of software engineers is now less about just writing code or knowing the syntax. It’s about knowing how to use LLMs today to write, refactor, and review code efficiently. If your interviews don’t account for this, you’re evaluating for an increasingly outdated skillset. 

Develop a Structured Scoring Rubric

Scoring rubrics make your requirements transparent and measurable. They remove bias, ensure that interviewers evaluate candidates against the same criteria, generate data on talent quality, and make it possible to evaluate large numbers of candidates without compromising your hiring bar.

To develop a scoring rubric for each role: 

• First list the key competencies for the role. 
• Define a scale for each competency by describing observable behaviors. 
• Then, train interviewers to use the rubric consistently. 

If You’re Launching or Scaling a GCC in India, Let’s Connect

The fastest-growing and highest-performing GCCs are already rethinking their talent evaluation strategy.

Karat can help you:

• Ensure your first wave of hires meets your global bar.
• Accelerate decision time while reducing candidate drop-off.
• Get consistent, senior-level technical evaluation.
• Build a high-performing engineering capability from day one.
  

If you’d like an introduction to discuss how high-performing GCCs are scaling with quality, contact Karat to learn more about how we make it easy to hire skilled software engineers.