Cognizant, a software services company headquartered in New Jersey and most of its operations in Chennai, is likely to start hiring in US just like its counterparts and lay off about 6000 – 10,000 “Non-performing and redundant”employees.
The Growing Protectionism in USA
Over the past few months, especially after the President Trump’s intervention in the ongoing H1-B scenario, there has been a significantly growing sentiment of protectionism across the different markets, including the USA. The countries are now seeking to ensure the job availability for the locals, and raising the bar for the workers coming from the foreign lands.
The new H1-B rules and the increasing emphasis on increasing the job vacancies for the US citizens in their home country, is making many Indian companies lay off their employees and start hiring in the US.
Like te other companies including Infosys and Wipro, Cognizant is going to increase its “headcount” in the USA in a bid to entice the Trump administration, which has been very critical of the outsourcing firms for taking the jobs away from the Americans in the most unfair manner.
Recently, the US accused Cognizant and other Indian companies like TCS and Infoys, of unfair cornering a huge share of the Americas work visas, specifically “H1-B” visas.
Ramped Up Hiring in USA
Rajeev Mehta, the Cognizant President said that the company is going to ramp up and increase a US based workforce by hiring the experienced professionals from the open markets, and make the better use of the diverse veteran, university and the other related programmes.
He attributed this shift of workforce to the fact that they are working on creating the more US jobs and the delivery centres within the country, and he also added that the company is going to augment its footprint of the delivery centres from 20 to a much higher number, with a percentage of these centres to be located in the USA.
He also mentioned that, in comparison to last year, Cognizant has applied for less than half the number of the H1-B visas in 2017, and this number will go down even further in the upcoming years.
In order to comply with the norms, many other IT firms in the USA are working on hiring more locals. The tightening of the visa regulations and norms will not only push the operational costs up for these tech giants, but, will also make the movement of the skilled workforce exceedingly difficult.