HCL Tech is likely to on-board 30,000 freshers in FY23 as the company steps up its campus hiring as the demand and supply gap widens, says VV Apparao, chief human resources officer.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Apparao said the company had been adding 40-50 percent more freshers every year and this would take the hiring count to 30,000.
In 2020, the company hired 14,000 freshers, and it looks to on-board 20,000-22,000 freshers in 2021.
“So, we seem to be roughly adding 40-50 percent more every year and I think we should be in the ballpark of 30,000 (for FY23),” he said. The company employs about 1.76 lakh people.
This comes at the back of the company’s move to create more in-house talent. Currently in the company hiring tally, freshers account for about 35 percent and 65 percent laterals. However, as the talent becomes expensive, it wants to increase fresher hiring to 70 percent over the next couple of years.
Having a higher fresher pipeline addresses the issue of high attrition amid the hiring boom the IT industry is seeing, filling the gap in terms of skills such as cybersecurity, where there is a crunch, and also the challenge of salary inflation.
At the back of the pandemic, demand is far outstripping the supply and it is one of the key challenges the IT companies are facing currently. In its earnings call last quarter, Cognizant said that it had to let go of some projects due to talent shortage.
While Apparao said that the company did not lose projects, he pointed out that execution timelines are getting stretched due to delay in on-boarding of talents.
“There is a huge demand supply gap, (which is) 200-300 percent kind of what we used to see,” Apparao pointed out.
According to Apparao, if this demand supply gap is not fulfilled the attrition will continue to increase since there is only a finite number of experienced professionals and if they are getting more money for their skills, they are going to leave.
This was one of the reasons why hiring more freshers has become important.
“So if you have a pipeline or mechanism in which you can create, train and deploy them, which is what we are doing with all of our capability teams. Increasingly, these timelines (to train and deploy) will get shorter and shorter and shorter,” he added.
The company is also hiring more freshers from reputed institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology. The company has recruited 206 from IITs this year, which was 134 last year. From the three Indian Institute of Management schools, Indian School of Business and XLRI the company has hired 26 people, which was zero last year.
“We have significantly increased hiring from IIMs. We want to increase the profile of HCL Tech in terms of skills. Even in fresher hiring we are trying to recruit only from top 200 colleges,” Apparao said
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