NEW DELHI: Employees in the tech sector should watch out for a shifting trend in hiring. Companies will be hiring fewer employees and those who know the latest skills.Emerging technologies such as automation pose a big threat to jobs. It can force companies to rationalise workforce and finish certain jobs. And India is expected to be hit the hardest.A global survey by ManpowerGroup released early this year asked 18,000 employers in 43 countries across six industry sectors how they expected technology to impact their business in the next two years. For the question—Where will digitisation increase or decrease headcount?—India had the most employers saying digitisation would decrease headcounts. Over a quarter of employers in India expect to reduce headcount due to digitisation.Emerging technologies are already taking away thousands of entry-level jobs in India. According to a TOI report, companies are improving their employee-utilisation levels and keeping fewer people on the bench. In the traditional spaces of application development & maintenance and infrastructure maintenance, growth is down.But the hiring spurred by emerging technologies will be different. Companies will be hiring more people with specialised skills as they would find it difficult to reskill all of their employees. Those in demand would be with expertise in areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things According to a Bloomberg report, data from Upwork, a website that matches freelancers with employers, reveals U.S. demand for software engineers who program computers to understand human speech grew faster than workers with any other skill. Voice-activated virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo devices have been made possible by natural language processing.Evolving technology works both ways—if it renders some tech skills obsolete, it creates demand for new skills too. But the catch is, hiring based on specialised skills may be far less than previous years because the nature of new business and its growth rate may not allow large-scale hiring.India leading six IT companies—Cognizant, Infosys Tech Mahindra TCS and HCL—have all seen their employee strength decline, except the last two. Headcount of all of the six companies put together dropped by 4,157 in the first six months of this fiscal, compared to an increase of almost 60,000 in the same period last year, according to a TOI report.The shifting pattern of hiring in the tech sector does not augur well for those with traditional IT skills. But even new jobs for those with specialised skills are going to be fewer.