This article is a preview of The Logic’s Daily Briefing newsletter, sent every weekday. Sign up for a free trial.

Indian IT consulting firm HCL Technologies plans to hire more than 2,000 new staff in Canada over the next three years, more than doubling its current country workforce. It’s the third such expansion by a subcontinental tech-services firm this month.  

The move: The company announced its recruiting push Friday and opened a new 350-person Mississauga, Ont. office. The new hires will roll out cloud technology, new applications and cybersecurity systems for clients, HCL CEO C Vijayakumar said at the launch event. AI is another focus. The firm currently has 1,200 staff across Burnaby, B.C.; Edmonton; Longueuil, Que.; Markham, Ont.; Moncton, N.B.; Toronto; Vancouver; and Victoria. HCL is mostly looking to hire locally, said Joelien Jose, executive vice-president and Canada head, in an interview with The Logic, although some positions will be filled by transfers from other divisions.

From the subcontinent: HCL is the third Indian IT giant to announce a major Canadian expansion in March. Bangalore-headquartered Infosys plans to double its 2,000-person workforce, including 500 new hires in Calgary, while Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will add over 500 employees focused on AI in Montreal, tripling its workforce in the city. Wipro, which completes the Indian IT big four, also has a large presence. The tech-services sector grew on the subcontinent thanks to outsourcing, primarily from the U.S. But recent challenges securing H-1B visas to bring in employees has prompted the industry to hire more locally, a nearshoring strategy that’s spilling over into Canada. “We don’t have that dependency, unlike some of our other competitors who have had to move jobs from the U.S. to Canada to offset the visa-related risks,” said Jose. HCL America staff received 2,301 new and renewed H-1Bs in the 2018 fiscal year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, 11th overall; TCS (8,760) was second, Infosys third (5,966) and Wipro eighth (3,150).       

The market: Clients in its Americas region make up about three-fifths of HCL’s business, which brought in revenue of ₹74,327 crores (US$10 billion) in 2020. “The banking industry, the public sector, retail and manufacturing [are] key spenders in the IT space [in Canada], and our focus is to get associated with these verticals,” said Jose. HCL’s existing Canadian workforce largely works with domestic clients. Canada lags the U.S. and OECD average on ICT investment, and policy experts and government-advisory groups have long called for measures to encourage technology adoption. 

The pipeline: In India, HCL has links to educational institutions in smaller cities, recruiting students into co-op-style work and school programs. It’s setting up similar partnerships here with high schools, colleges and universities. In one such program, institutions “assimilate some of our curriculum into their mix” for the final year, said Jose. “That way they are much more ready coming out of college.” Partners include the Peel public and Catholic school boards; Jose declined to disclose the names of partnering colleges and universities, citing ongoing negotiations. 

The Ontario angle: “We will continue to focus our attention on India from the tech aspect,” Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli told The Logic. He first visited HCL’s headquarters on a November 2019 trade mission, and then alongside regional attraction agency Toronto Global “worked the phones … like you normally would on a sales opportunity.” The province isn’t giving HCL financial incentives for the expansion, but Fedeli cited the Progressive Conservative government’s tax cuts as well as the local talent pool as attractions. Ontario also has a deal with NASSCOM, an Indian IT industry association, to promote the province to expanding members.

Smaller sites: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all announced plans to hire hundreds over the last 13 months, mostly in major innovation-economy ecosystems like Toronto, Vancouver, Kitchener-Waterloo and Montreal. Domestic startups and scale-ups are also competing for that talent. HCL has “diversified … from a hiring perspective so that we are not dependent on one hot market or the other,” said Jose, citing the Moncton location, which opened in 2019.