Quarterly synthesis · Q2 2026

Confidence hit a sixteen-year high, and supply became the thing that decides who wins.

Q2 2026 paired a rare combination: employer confidence at a sixteen-year high with a supply bottleneck tightening underneath it. India's Net Employment Outlook reached 68% for the quarter, the strongest reading since 2008, so demand was not the problem this cycle. Supply was. GCCs out-hired IT services for a third straight year, adding roughly 200,000 net employees in FY26, while talent scarcity hit 82% and AI skills became the single hardest capability to find. This edition reads the quarter in three findings, with the full data behind each.

Recruise Intelligence

Published June 2026

Key Findings

What the quarter is actually saying.

Three findings define Q2 2026. The full report carries the city map, the sector scarcity grid and the salary bands behind them; these are the ones we'd flag in a leadership conversation.

Confidence hit a sixteen-year high.

Hiring intent this quarter was the strongest India has recorded in sixteen years, with the Net Employment Outlook at 68%, the strongest reading since 2008. That confidence is broad but not evenly spread, and the sharpest signal sits inside AI: year on year, AI hiring rose 44% in Hyderabad, 34% in Delhi NCR and 31% in Chennai. When every employer is confident at once, they compete for the same hires and the strongest candidates clear fast.

68%

Net Employment Outlook, highest since 2008

GCCs out-hired IT services for a third year.

For the third straight year the GCCs out-hired IT services, adding almost twice the net employees the services firms did in FY26, roughly 200,000 against 110,000. The scale behind that is now substantial: around 2,117 centres employing 2.36 million professionals and generating $98.4 billion in revenue, with more than 1,200 already running embedded AI and ML and 58% investing in agentic AI. GenAI, MLOps, cloud platform engineering and cybersecurity led the hiring, and the centres pay a premium of roughly 12 to 30% over comparable non-GCC roles.

200K

GCC net adds, FY26, about 2× IT services

AI skills are the hardest hire in the market.

The bottleneck this quarter was supply, not demand. Talent scarcity in India reached 82%, well above the 72% global average, and AI skills became the single hardest capability to find, against a 53% AI skills deficit and AI demand up 300% since 2024. AI model development, named by 39% of employers, tops the hard-to-find list. Because the shortage is this broad, the first response has shifted from buying capability to building it, with 37% of employers naming upskilling as their primary answer.

82%

Talent scarcity, vs 72% global

Chart of the edition

Real estate and the GCCs lead the 2026 pay band.

Projected 2026 salary hikes by sector across India, against an India Inc average of 9.1%. Real estate and infrastructure top the band at 10.9%, with GCCs close behind at 10.4%, while tech consulting moderates at 6.8%.

Projected 2026 salary hike by sector, India

Projected 2026 salary hike Leads the band: real estate & infra

Source: Recruise Hiring Pulse, Q2 2026.

Hiring into this market

Hiring into an 82% scarcity market? We run the search.

GenAI, MLOps, cloud and platform engineering, and senior leadership bands across the GCCs. If you're competing for the same scarce profiles as everyone else, this is the desk that moves at market speed.

Start a mandate

Inside this edition

What's inside this edition.

Sequenced so CHROs and talent leaders get the strategic read up top, and the working tables underneath; built to skim in minutes and use the same day.

01 The big picture, in brief

02 Executive summary & monthly momentum

03 Finding 1 · Confidence at a sixteen-year high

04 Finding 2 · GCCs out-hire IT services

05 Finding 3 · AI skills are the binding constraint

06 The People Read · Compensation & Attrition

07 Leadership & Culture Outlook

08 Where to act this quarter

Methodology & sources

This quarterly synthesis draws on Recruise's own GCC hiring analysis (proprietary), read against public sources: MEOS, Naukri JobSpeak, the Nasscom-Zinnov GCC data and EY public research, to Q2 2026 (April to June 2026). The Net Employment Outlook of 68%, the 82% talent scarcity and the 53% AI skills deficit are drawn from those public trackers; the projected 2026 sector salary hikes, the GCC net-add and 12 to 30% premium figures, and the sector scarcity ratings are Recruise Intelligence data. Figures are indicative and vary with company size and location.

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