HCL to comply with SL salary structure when recruiting software engineers
Being the first Board of Investment (BOI) approved conglomerate to enter Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic, HCL Technologies, a global technology company based in India, promises to comply with the local salary structure when recruiting software engineers in Sri Lanka.
HCL Technologies, Corporate Vice President, Srimathi Shivashankar made this remark during a virtual launch of the company through a webinar media briefing last week when the Business Times questioned, how HCL will optimise the human resources cost in Sri Lanka in the tech sector as compared to India.
Ms. Shivashankar said, “The cost associated with the job role differs from country to country. We will comply with the local required norms from the wage-able perspective and that is how we will continue to optimise wherever we operate from. SLASSCOM has already given us a salary structure of tech experts in Sri Lanka for which HCL will comply with.”
During the Q&A session, she also mentioned that HCL has already started to ‘work from home’ ever since the beginning of the pandemic. “We have built robust IT systems to deliver work-from-home whether it is to do with information security or an employee productivity aspect. Remote working has caught on extremely well. Today when we serve our customers no one asks from where it is being delivered whereas everyone is only looking at the product outcome. That kind of standardization and maturity has quickly picked up in the tech industry within the last three months,” she added.
She also stressed, “We have come to Sri Lanka for the talent here. As a knowledge transfer process many nationalities will be working from Sri Lanka at our local campus. Already a few local bright software engineers have come on board HCL through recruitment at the World Trade Centre office.”
An investment of US$ 10 million will be made in Sri Lanka in the coming years as a commitment to the knowledge capital. “When we build the campus there will be a larger investment made on the infrastructure. For the moment we will work from the Orion City building from September this year,” noted Ms. Shivashankar.
She said HCL has made $9 billion in revenue and more than 150,000 employees from over 155 countries are employed at HCL worldwide. In Sri Lanka 1500 people will be recruited in the first 18 months and around 5000 people in the next 3-5 years (including foreign nationals). Job opportunities will evolve in software engineering, application development, product testing and infrastructure management and support.