Reliance, Vodafone, Airtel may increase their headcount by 25% in FY24

India's top three telcos — Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, and Bharti Airtel — will likely add 25 per cent more employees in FY24 as they work on 5G coverage expansion and monetisation.

Experts said that the hiring activity by the three telcos picked up in FY23 after a slowdown in FY22, according to a report in The Economic Times (ET).

Sekhar Garisa, chief executive officer of staffing firm FoundIt, said, "5G has played a big role (in the hiring activity) as there were a lot of jobs that were created during the year. This, coupled with the digitisation efforts by enterprises, led to an increase in telecom needs."

Reliance Jio's total headcount at FY23 end was 95,326; Airtel's was 64,407; and Vodafone Idea's was 15,604.

The hiring by telcos was more significant for profiles such as network engineers, network architects, cloud computing experts, data scientists, data analysts, and cyber security specialists.

Sachin Alug, the founder of staffing firm NLB Services, said that the major areas witnessing hiring growth are network infrastructure, network upgradation, network migration, and network security.

"Most of the profiles in these domains are also reported to command about 12 per cent higher pay packages," Alug said.

In FY23, there was an increase in contractual hiring by telcos. The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report by the telcos in FY23 showed that Airtel's hiring of contractual workers in FY23 increased to 50,699 from 26,613.

For Vodafone Idea, this number moved almost 3.5 times in FY23 to 6,234 from 1,771 in FY22.

An official said that in the case of Vodafone Idea, the increase in contractual hiring could be a cost-saving measure.