FAAMNG Hiring Plummets Over 55% Leading to Vacant job positions

Active job openings have reduced to 10% compared to the usual active FAAMNG hiring volumes

In the month of May this year, Y combinator, the startup accelerator sent an e-mail to its portfolio founders asking them to plan for the worst. As the markets were tanking already, it didn't come as a surprise. But very few could predict that big-tech companies hiring freeze would impact Indian companies very badly that too with a sharp cut in the percentage of FAAMNG jobs.  In a recent report, Xpheno brings out the reasons why FAAMNG companies are pulling back from active hiring. As per the report, until July, the big tech companies would have up to 40,000 openings in India and with active hiring standing at 9000 jobs. For the uninitiated, active hiring implies the number of posts a company fills or actively accepts applications in a month. Xpheno reported active job openings have reduced to 10% when compared to the usual active FAAMNG hiring volumes. "Active hiring action across FAAMNG is ranging from nearly none to low-moderate levels. Primarily led by the festive season hiring action by Amazon, the active volumes have less to gain from marquees like Meta and Netflix," said Xpheno co-founder Kamal Karanth. He adds that FAAMNG hiring is going through its worst phase across the skill sets and hierarchy of functions.

Less is More

Earlier while announcing Q3 results asked employees to be prepared for lay-offs, it didn't sound like a real threat. However, with increasing cost overruns and dwindling returns, companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft reduced their hiring count and resorted to mass layoffs. According to a Crunchbase report, over 32,000 techies working for Microsoft, Meta have been given pink slips in late July. And this trend is not limited to tech companies alone as ride-sharing platform Uber, Netflix and Cryptocurrency exchanges were too into cutting manpower. Meta will remain a company of the same size or even smaller by 2023, says Mark Zuckerberg!! In August, Apple, in a deliberate move removed around 100 contract workers. Google, the peer company in an internal e-mail informed its employees that it would freeze hiring for the rest of the year. It is the first time that such massive layoffs are happening ever since the 2008 economic downturn that even tech stalwarts couldn't stand up to the economic headwinds.  

Indian Tech Pool on The Brink

As two-thirds of the employees of FAAMNG companies belong to India, the Indian tech job market is about to take the hardest hit. With around 3.8 million employees making up 21.1 percent of the global tech force, it will have far-reaching ramifications as FAAMNG hiring declines.  But a NASSCOM report providing a contrasting view, says US and Chinese markets are currently going through a demand-supply gap and it would be greatly beneficial to US tech majors to benefit from relatively cheap labor by hiring tech talent from India. But the point of contention remains, how far tech companies would be willing to hire talent from a product company to work for outsourced jobs, which are mostly service oriented. So, it would be fair to say Big Tech's hiring slump will not directly benefit Indian IT services companies. "There are always people who aspire to move from services companies to product companies. Now, that is going to be even more difficult," says Monster.com CEO Sekhar Garisa. He opined as the companies are scaling down long-term projects – which are essentially product-based – the prospective openings will definitely come down.