By Nishant Chandra
I've been watching India's tech hiring landscape for over a decade now, and what's happening today isn't what most people think it is.
This isn't a hiring freeze, but a reckoning: the established playbook of mass campus recruitment and hire-to-train models has been quietly torn up, replaced by a market that is brutally selective about who gets through the door.
In 2021, India's largest IT firms hired over 225,000 fresh graduates. This year, they'll bring in less than a third of that number. Entry-level positions have dropped 18% year-on-year. I know of roles in Bengaluru that received 10,000+ applications for a single opening.
One hiring manager I spoke with recently interviewed 450 candidates for a software engineering position. They hired none of them. Most couldn't explain basic system design choices. Others had impressive-looking projects but couldn't walk through their own code.
This change goes beyond simple cost-cutting; it signifies a more fundamental shift.
Here's what I've learned from countless conversations with CTOs, recruiters, and engineering leads: companies are done training people on the job.
The economics have shifted. Between AI acceleration, margin pressures from global clients, and the rising cost of onboarding, every hire needs to contribute from week one. Not month six. Week one.
And AI's role here gets misunderstood. It hasn't eliminated jobs. It eliminated the stepping stones. The grunt work that used to be entry-level? Automated. Basic testing, routine debugging, simple data cleanup. These were the tasks that taught you how professional code actually works.
Now, "entry-level" means you can design systems, write production-ready code, and work across teams without handholding. The bottom rung of the ladder hasn't disappeared. It's just been moved three feet higher.
We graduate 1.6 million engineers every year. Only 16% get jobs. Just 2% make it into top-tier tech roles.
The issue is not one of a lacking talent pipeline, but rather a deficiency in adequate preparation.
I've sat in on hiring discussions where we filtered 4,000+ resumes to shortlist 70 candidates. And even among those who cleared multiple rounds, some couldn't explain the logic behind their own projects. They'd clearly used ChatGPT or Copilot to generate answers but had zero conceptual clarity underneath.
I am not criticizing these candidates.They're playing by the rules they were given: get good grades, do your assignments, clear your exams. The problem is those rules are obsolete.
Employers don't care what you studied anymore. They care what you've shipped.
The strongest candidates I've seen lately all have one thing in common: they built things outside the classroom.
Real projects. Open-source contributions. Internships where they shipped actual features. Hackathons where they solved messy, ambiguous problems under time pressure. Freelance work that taught them what clients actually want.
These aren't resume decorations. They're proof that you can work in the grey areas between theory and practice, which is where all real engineering happens.
And here's something that would've been unthinkable ten years ago: nearly 30% of companies in India have dropped degree requirements from their job listings entirely. They run their own assessments. They build their own talent bootcamps.
If you're good, you're in. If you're not, no brand-name college will save you.
Let me be direct: the tech job market hasn't dried up. It's become genuinely meritocratic, maybe for the first time.
That's terrifying if you've been coasting. But it's liberating if you're willing to put in the work.
Stop optimizing for the placement season. Start building things today. Don't wait for someone to assign you a project—create your own. Learn tools, not just languages. Docker matters more than design patterns you memorized for an exam. React matters more than your data structures grade.
Find mentors who've actually shipped products, not just people who've just taught for 20 years. Every side project, every internship, every contribution to an open-source repo. It all adds up. That's your surface area of luck. And in this market, it's surface area that gets you noticed, not your CGPA.
India's digital economy is still projected to create 90 million tech jobs this decade. The opportunity hasn't shrunk.
But the entry barrier has fundamentally shifted: from degree to ability.
The colleges and bootcamps that will thrive aren't the ones with the best placement stats. They're the ones preparing students to actually deliver outcomes. That means real projects from day one. Real deadlines. Real feedback from people who've built things that matter.
The filtering will only intensify. But here's the upside: if you adapt early, you won't just get hired, you'll set the standard everyone else is measured against.
