BT to hire 1,800 new roles in Bengaluru and Gurugram in India

BT is set to hire 2,800 new employees in the UK and India, as it attempts to reduce its reliance on subcontracted labour.

The company is aiming to grow its in-house digital talent staff to 6,300 people by April 2024, from 3,500 at the start of the financial year, it revealed today.

In India, BT will recruit around 1,800 new workers centred around the company’s hubs in Bengaluru and Gurugram. Meanwhile, in the UK, BT plans to on-board 1,000 new employees who will be based around BT’s hub sites in Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Belfast, Ipswich and London. The majority of the new UK digital talent will be based outside of the capital, and the company added that the new talent should be based at one of the company’s workspaces where possible.

The new talent is set to fill roles in product management, software engineering, cloud, design, data, AI and machine learning, and agile delivery.

The company revealed that its financial outlook remains unchanged for the next financial year as the incremental costs associated with these hiring plans are offset by a reduction in its reliance on subcontracted labour.

“Digital was founded to accelerate BT’s transformation, innovation and return to growth,” said Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT. “To succeed, we need to bring in and upskill the top digital talent, and our efforts will boost the tech communities in the UK and India along the way.”

BT will focus on entry talent, which could make up as many of the 400 planned new roles, focused on apprentices, graduates, women returners, and others starting their careers in digital. The company said it was working with organisations like Code First Girls and 10,000 Black Interns and underlined it knows its success lies in working with a diverse range of talent.

The telecoms company said that potential candidates can visit its digital careers site to learn more about the roles.

This comes at a time when several tech companies have cut back on hiring. Nvidia revealed in May it had enacted a hiring pause as part of a way to deal with the rising threat of inflation. Microsoft also reportedly said in the same month it had told staff to be more cautious about recruitment, in a bid to slow its hiring amid a global market downturn.