A 60-person UK software company has signed for a co-working floor in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout and wants six backend engineers and a QA lead by the end of the quarter. The VP of Engineering posts the roles on LinkedIn on a Monday and has more than a thousand applications by Friday, most of them nowhere near the brief. Two offers go out in week four. Both candidates accept. Both are on 90-day notice periods.
One is talked into staying with a counter-offer in week seven. The other stops replying to WhatsApp messages the week before joining, having quietly accepted a better offer from a global capability centre down the road. Three months in, the company has a lease, a laptop order and no team.
Nothing in that story is unusual. India has one of the deepest talent pools anywhere, but it punishes employers who think a post plus an offer letter equals a hire. The volume is huge, the signal is thin, and most hires are won or lost in the weeks between ‘accepted’ and ‘joined’.
This playbook is for founders, HR leads and finance teams hiring in India, whether for a first local team, a delivery centre or one specialist through an employer of record. It covers where Indian candidates look, what changed with the four Labour Codes, how consultancies and campus placements work, what to put in the ad, and how to survive the notice period. It is one of the country guides in our Finding the Right Person hub, and it assumes you have already done the basics in the 50 questions to answer before you open a job posting.
One warning: India is not one labour market. A Kubernetes engineer in Bengaluru, a pharma quality manager in Hyderabad and 40 field-sales executives in Uttar Pradesh are three different campaigns, with different platforms, languages and timelines.
- Naukri is still the default board for white-collar hiring, LinkedIn wins for mid-senior and GCC-style roles, and apna dominates frontline hiring through a mobile app.
- The four Labour Codes have applied since 21 November 2025: appointment letters, fixed-term parity and a new definition of wages all affect how you write offers.
- Notice periods of 60 to 90 days are normal in tech and services, so plan for buyouts, counter-offers and candidates who accept more than one offer.
- Quote pay as CTC in lakhs per annum and say what’s fixed and what’s variable. Pay transparency isn’t mandatory, but leaving pay out costs you response rates.
- The DPDP Act’s main obligations phase in over 18 months from November 2025, so build consent and retention rules for candidate data now.
Six cities, six different talent markets
Most professional hiring in India runs through six metros, each with its own personality. Bengaluru is the deepest pool for software, product, data and startup talent, and the most contested. Hyderabad has become a serious rival for capability centres, cloud and pharma-life-sciences roles. Pune mixes IT services with automotive, engineering and manufacturing, and is strong for embedded systems and mechanical design. Delhi NCR (Gurugram and Noida in particular) leans towards consulting, finance, e-commerce, sales leadership and corporate functions. Chennai is the industrial and SaaS city: automotive, electronics manufacturing, banking operations and a well-regarded SaaS cluster. Mumbai is the home of banking, markets and media.
The scale of the capability-centre boom shapes everything. A joint Nasscom and Zinnov report published in 2026 counted 2,117 global capability centres in India employing about 2.36 million people, with revenue close to $100 billion in FY26. A small foreign employer is competing with well-funded centres that pay above market and have recognisable brands. You rarely win on salary alone; you win on scope, speed, ownership and a manager candidates want to work for.
The shortages sit in the middle of the experience curve. Entry-level supply is plentiful, though skills readiness varies. The squeeze is in engineers with four to ten years of hands-on experience in cloud, data, machine learning, cybersecurity and product, and in finance and compliance professionals who know both Indian and international standards. Tier-2 cities such as Ahmedabad, Kochi, Coimbatore, Jaipur and Indore are increasingly realistic for remote or hub-and-spoke teams.
Where Indian candidates actually look
Indian job seekers use several platforms at once, and the board you choose quietly decides who applies. Naukri is the reflex for white-collar candidates: its parent Info Edge says it holds over 75% of traffic among recruitment peers, and its CV database (Resdex) is the first tool most in-house recruiters open. LinkedIn matters more the more senior or international the role, as it’s home to people who already work with foreign teams.
Below that, the market splits by segment. apna is the default for frontline, field-sales, delivery and retail jobs: app-first and multilingual. Instahyre and Cutshort suit engineering and product roles. foundit (rebranded from Monster India in 2022) is a useful second board for generalists. Info Edge’s niche sites, iimjobs for management and hirist for tech, are worth a look, and Internshala is the go-to for interns.
Two channels never appear in platform rankings but carry a lot of Indian hiring: WhatsApp, where candidates often respond faster than to email, and employee referrals, which in many tech companies produce a large share of hires; a referral bonus paid after probation is a normal, expected mechanism. Our guide to designing a referral programme that actually finds the right person covers how to reward it without creating a clique. For a side-by-side view of India’s boards against other markets, see the job boards by country directory.
The public side: NCS, career centres and the new Labour Codes
India’s public employment service is the National Career Service portal, run by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. It’s free, hosts job fairs and links to state employment exchanges now being repositioned as career centres. The scale is large: in a written answer to the Lok Sabha in August 2026, the Labour Minister said more than 6.6 crore (66 million) jobseekers had registered since launch, about 2.9 crore of them active, and that over 10 crore vacancies had been mobilised. For professional roles it won’t be your main source, but for apprentices, entry-level and inclusion hiring it’s worth a free listing.
The bigger change is legal. The four Labour Codes (on Wages, Industrial Relations, Social Security, and Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions) came into force on 21 November 2025, replacing 29 older central laws. Appointment letters are now mandatory. Fixed-term staff get the same statutory benefits as permanent staff, with pro-rata gratuity. A uniform definition of ‘wages’ adds back allowances above 50% of total pay when contributions are calculated, which changes how a CTC offer is built. The Code on Social Security also lets the central or state government require employers in notified establishments to report vacancies to a career centre before filling them, though reporting does not oblige you to hire through the centre. Check whether your state has notified it, as central and state rules are rolling out on different timetables.
States still matter. Shops and Establishments Acts govern office hours, leave and registration, and states have experimented with local-hiring quotas: Haryana’s law was struck down by its High Court in 2023, and Karnataka shelved a draft bill in 2024. Put local rules on counsel’s checklist before the first ad goes up.
Consultancies and campus placements: how hires really get made
India has thousands of recruitment consultancies, from two-person desks to global search firms, and contingency is the norm. Commonly quoted fees run from about 8.33% of annual CTC (one month’s pay, a long-standing benchmark for junior and volume roles) through 12–15% for mid-level hires, to 20% or more for senior and retained executive search. Replacement guarantees of 60 to 90 days are standard, and given the notice-period dynamics below, make sure the guarantee runs from the joining date, not the offer date. Our country-by-country guide to recruitment agency fees and contracts has template terms worth borrowing.
Campus hiring is the other big engine. Premier institutes (IITs, IIMs, NITs and top private universities) run placement seasons with tightly managed slots, and the day you’re given signals your standing with students; pre-placement offers to summer interns are a growing route in. For a small foreign employer the realistic plays are an internship that converts, off-campus drives with Tier-2 colleges where you can be the most interesting employer in the room, and coding challenges. Top-campus seasons start in winter; arrive in spring and the best graduates are taken.
Writing the ad: CTC, notice periods and the DPDP Act
Indian candidates read an ad for four things: the pay, the notice period you’ll accept, the location and work model, and how serious you are. Pay is quoted as cost to company (CTC) in lakhs per annum: ‘₹18–24 LPA’. CTC bundles fixed pay, variable pay, provident fund and gratuity, so it overstates take-home pay, and experienced candidates will ask for the fixed component. Say what’s fixed up front. There’s no pay-transparency mandate, but ads with a range get noticeably better response. Our guide to setting the pay band before you post explains how to benchmark.
Notice-period language shapes your pipeline more than any other line. ‘Immediate joiners preferred’ is legal and common, but it filters out most strong mid-level candidates. ‘We can support notice buyout’ widens the pool. Be specific on work model, too: ‘hybrid, three days in Whitefield’ beats ‘Bengaluru’.
On discrimination, Indian private-sector law is patchier than in the EU, but it’s not empty. The Code on Wages bars gender discrimination in recruitment for the same work, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act and the Transgender Persons Act protect those groups, and the Constitution’s equality guarantees shape public expectations. Ad habits that still turn up, such as ‘male candidates only’, ‘age below 28’ or ‘convent-educated’, create legal risk and damage your brand. The job ad legal check for 20 countries covers the wording in detail.
Candidate data is the new frontier. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 now has operating rules, notified on 14 November 2025, with most substantive obligations (notice, security safeguards, breach intimation, retention limits and data-principal rights) applying after an 18-month transition, so from around May 2027. Penalties can reach ₹250 crore per breach. The Act’s employment-purpose ground is widely read as covering employees rather than applicants, so give candidates a clear notice, collect consent at application, and set a retention period for unsuccessful CVs, including those downloaded from Resdex or sent by consultancies.
The notice-period problem nobody plans for
Here’s the part foreign employers underestimate. In Indian tech, IT services, consulting and banking, contractual notice periods of 60 to 90 days are standard, and many employers insist that the full period be served unless the employee pays a buyout (salary in lieu of the unserved days) or the employer agrees to release them early. Notice is set by contract rather than one national rule, but assume a strong mid-level candidate cannot start for two to three months.
Those weeks are dangerous. The current employer has three months to counter-offer, and many do. Rival recruiters see the ‘serving notice’ flag on Naukri and LinkedIn and call. Some candidates hold two or three offers and pick one in the final fortnight. Reported dropout rates vary widely by role and source, but almost every Indian recruiter can tell you about a day-one no-show.
The fix is engagement, not penalty clauses. Treat the notice period as onboarding: a hiring-manager call in week two, a team meet-up, the laptop sent early, prompt background verification and a clear day-one plan. Consider reimbursing part of a buyout for critical roles, or a joining bonus paid on arrival, and keep your silver-medal candidate warm until the hire has joined. See making the offer for offer mechanics; the timeline below shows where the risks cluster.
Keep the process to a recruiter screen, a technical round, a hiring-manager round and an HR conversation on CTC and joining date, ideally within three to four weeks. Aptitude tests and coding challenges are familiar; long unpaid take-homes get abandoned. Verification of employment, education and address is routine, as are requests for recent payslips and a relieving letter. Check that your background-check provider covers India well.
Hiring without an entity, and hiring foreigners into India
If you want one or two people before forming a private limited company, an employer of record can issue compliant appointment letters and run payroll, provident fund and gratuity. Long-term ‘contractor’ arrangements for people who work like employees are risky. Our guide to hiring where you have no entity lays out the trade-offs, and the employer-of-record comparison covers the providers.
Bringing foreign nationals into India is the exception rather than the rule. Employment visas carry a minimum salary threshold (historically around US$25,000 a year, with exceptions), and foreign staff must register with the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. The more common international play runs the other way: hiring Indian professionals returning from the Gulf, Singapore, Europe or North America, who bring the cross-cultural experience foreign employers value. A LinkedIn campaign aimed at the diaspora in one city abroad can produce strong shortlists.
Discover more from Kurums | Business Intelligence
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.