You found the right person.
Six weeks of sourcing, four rounds of interviews, two internal debates about budget, one near-miss when someone on the panel had cold feet. And then – finally – a verbal yes. Your new senior engineer is excited. Your team is relieved. You start mentally filling in their name on the org chart.
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Then they send you their resignation letter. And you read the part that says their notice period is 90 days.
Ninety days.
If you’ve never been hired in India before, this is the moment the ground shifts beneath you. You weren’t planning for three months. You were planning for three weeks – maybe four, the way it works in the UK, or the two weeks that are standard across most of the US. You had a product milestone. A team dependency. A quiet promise to your CTO that the backend lead would be in place before the next sprint cycle.
None of that changes. But your timeline just did.
This Is Not an Edge Case
India has the longest standard notice periods of any major tech hiring market in the world. For senior engineers – anyone with meaningful experience at an established company – 60 to 90 days is not the exception. It is the written contractual norm. Three months of continued employment, with the previous employer, while your new hire is in limbo – still showing up to the old office, still sitting in the old meetings, still technically employed by someone else.
This catches almost every first-time global employer in India off guard. Not because they didn’t do their research, but because it genuinely doesn’t come up until after the offer is accepted. Nobody mentions it in the sourcing phase. Candidates don’t lead with it — they’re excited about the new role and quietly hoping the situation will sort itself out. By the time it surfaces, you’re already emotionally and operationally committed to this person. The cost of backing out now is enormous. So you wait.
And the waiting is where the real risk lives.
What Actually Happens During Those 90 Days
Here’s the part that nobody writes about: the notice period is not downtime. It is a negotiation – one your candidate is in the middle of, whether they want to be or not.
The moment a valued engineer hands in their resignation, their current employer wakes up. Counter-offers come quickly, and in India’s competitive talent market, they come hard. A salary bump of 20 to 30 percent is common. A title change, a team change, a promise of that promotion that’s been sitting on someone’s desk for six months – suddenly, magically, it materialises. The engineer who told you they were 100% committed is now sitting across from their current manager being told they’re irreplaceable.
Some of them hold firm. Others don’t. Industry estimates suggest that between 20 and 30 percent of accepted offers in India’s senior tech market result in the candidate either renegotiating with their current employer or withdrawing from the new role entirely – all during the notice period, after your offer was signed.
That’s not a flaw in the candidate’s character. It’s human nature, under three months of sustained social and financial pressure, in a job market where their current employer is highly motivated to keep them.
What Companies That Navigate This Well Actually Do
The companies that lose the fewest hires during notice periods treat the period not as a waiting room but as a relationship. They keep the candidate warm – not in a transactional, “just checking in” way, but genuinely. They introduce them to the team early. They share a project brief. They invite them to a planning session, even as an observer. They make the future feel real and present, rather than a vague promise three months away.
They also have frank conversations about counter-offers – before the resignation happens. Not to issue warnings or extract loyalty pledges, but to ask: if your current employer comes back with something different, what would you actually want? Sometimes that conversation surfaces a concern that can be addressed on your side. Sometimes it just makes the candidate feel seen and taken seriously, which is its own retention mechanism.
The smartest companies also engage legal and HR counsel early on the question of notice buyouts. In India, it is common – and fully legal – for the incoming employer to cover some or all of the financial penalty for early release. The cost is usually a fraction of what re-recruitment would cost if the hire falls through.
The Number Worth Keeping in Mind
Replacing a failed senior hire in India – re-sourcing, re-interviewing, the productivity gap – typically costs between ₹8 and ₹12 lakhs by the time you account for recruiter fees, team bandwidth, and delayed output. The notice period buyout that might have prevented it is, in most cases, a fraction of that.
The 90 days aren’t going away. Indian labour contracts aren’t going to converge with the US standard anytime soon, and frankly, they shouldn’t – long notice periods provide stability for workers in a market without the safety nets common in the West.
But you can work with them. You just have to know they’re coming.
About Teksands
Teksands is a specialist tech recruitment firm helping global companies source, hire, and retain engineering talent in India. If you’re hiring for your first India-based remote role or building a distributed team, we’re happy to talk through what the market actually looks like – before you’re 90 days into a waiting period you weren’t expecting.
