HR Advisory · Talent Management

Losing People to GCCs? Retention Strategy When You Can't Match the Pay

Global Capability Centres are hiring at premiums of around 40%. If you're a domestic employer or a scaleup, you will not win on cash. Here is what you can win on.

If you employ skilled people in Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Pune, you have felt it: a Global Capability Centre opens, and three months later your best engineer leaves for a number you cannot match. GCCs are aggressively hiring niche skills with premiums of around 40%. For a domestic employer or a scaleup, the instinct is to try to compete on salary. That instinct is a trap. You will lose a bidding war you cannot afford, and you will distort your whole pay structure trying.

Why cash is the wrong battlefield

A GCC's economics are different from yours. It is a cost centre for a global parent, funded to acquire capability, often indifferent to local pay norms. If you anchor your retention strategy on matching their offers, you are fighting an opponent with a structurally bigger wallet and a different objective function. The good news is that money is rarely the only — or even the main — reason people stay.

What you can actually win on

• Growth paths that are real and visible. "Fast-track career paths" have become a standard retention tool precisely because ambitious people fear being stuck. A GCC role can be a gilded cage — high pay, narrow scope. If your people can see a path to bigger responsibility, that path competes with cash.
• Ownership and scope. At a scaleup, a good engineer owns a whole system. At a large GCC, they often own a sliver of one. For builders, scope is a powerful retainer.
• ESOPs. Equity has moved beyond startups into standard retention practice. A credible equity story offers an upside a salaried GCC role cannot, and it aligns the person's interest with the company's over a multi-year horizon.
• Managed change and low anxiety. The biggest retention risk in 2026 is unmanaged human anxiety around AI and restructuring. Six in ten companies report a drop in discretionary effort. A workplace where change is explained and people feel informed retains better than one paying more but managing change badly.

Building the strategy

1. Identify your flight risks precisely. Not everyone is being courted by a GCC. Focus retention investment on the specific roles and people most exposed.
2. Make growth paths explicit. Vague "opportunities to grow" do nothing. Named next roles, with the criteria to reach them, do.
3. Use equity deliberately. Design ESOPs so they vest meaningfully over the horizon you most want to retain, and so people actually understand what they hold.
4. Invest in managers. People leave managers, not companies. In an anxious market, the manager who explains change and gives transparency is your strongest retention asset.
5. Fix wellbeing as a baseline, not a perk. Mental-health coverage and benefits that extend to parents have become retention standards, not extras.

The honest caveat

None of this means you can ignore pay entirely. If your compensation is materially below market for a role, no amount of culture will hold people — you have to be in a defensible range first. Engagement is what wins at the margin, when the GCC offer is somewhat higher but not life-changingly so. Get pay to "fair," then win on everything else. The data work to know whether your pay is fair is the same audit that answers the Board's equity question.