GCCs vs IT Services Vendors: The Talent Tug-of-War

Imagine the exact companies that historically outsourced their technology work to Indian IT services vendors, covered throughout this page, increasingly building their own in-house Global Capability Centres instead, and then, rather than simply competing for new graduates, actively hiring away experienced employees who built their careers and technical expertise working at those same IT services vendors. This talent competition represents a genuinely direct, uncomfortable dynamic between GCCs and traditional IT services firms.

The numbers illustrate why GCCs have become such attractive employers, GCC attrition fell to roughly 9% in 2025, down from 13% in 2023, and genuinely the lowest attrition of any major employer segment across India's entire technology sector, reflecting that employees who move to GCCs tend to stay, drawn by direct employment with a globally recognised brand, often better compensation, and more direct involvement in strategic technology decisions than a vendor role typically offers.

This dynamic creates a genuinely uncomfortable position for traditional IT services vendors, they've spent decades building India's technical talent pool and training pipeline, only to see an increasing share of that trained talent migrate directly to GCCs once those centres scale up their own hiring, essentially capturing the return on training investment IT services vendors originally made.

This talent competition connects directly to the broader GCC growth story and revenue-employment decoupling covered elsewhere on this site, as GCCs continue expanding toward their projected 2,500+ centres and 2.8-2.9 million employees by 2030, IT services vendors face a genuine structural challenge, competing not just for new graduates against each other, but against considerably more attractive GCC employment offers for their own existing, experienced workforce, a genuinely different competitive pressure than the client-relationship-level competition these vendors have always faced.