Indian IT services company HCLTech reported net addition of 17,067 for the fiscal year 2023, a significant plunge of around 57.3 percent from the 39,900 employees added in FY22. This comes at a time when the IT services companies have started reducing hiring to focus on improving employee utilisation rates.
HCLTech’s full-year fresher hiring target of 30,000 as discussed by its CEO and MD, C Vijayakumar, during its Q1FY23 earnings call too was missed. Total fresher addition for FY23 came in at 26,734.
Fresher addition for Q4FY23 stood at 4,480 freshers.
It added 3,674 employees in the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2022. The total headcount of the company at present stands at 225,944. This is higher than the previous quarter's net addition of over 2,945 employees in Q3, but significantly lower than the 11,100 employees hired in the same quarter last fiscal.
Ramachandran Sundararajan, chief people officer at HCLTech said, "The good thing is we honoured all the offers that we made, without any onboarding delays. That's baked into our quarterly roll out plans."
"Attrition has been a phenomenal story. In summary, the success we have had in FY23 is clearly attributable to our people strengths not only in our numbers but also in terms of skills and investments we have made through the year in our upskilling programmes," he added.
Sundararajan maintained that around 85 percent of the company's employees are a part of the variable pay programme, which accounts for only 5 percent component of their pay package. And there is no change in the policy.
In FY24, the company targets to add 15,000 freshers that will be higher than the gross addition.
The Q4 attrition rate for the quarter stood at 19.5 percent on last twelve months (LTM) basis, decreasing significantly from 21.7 percent in the previous quarter and 21.9 percent in the same quarter last year.
HCLTech also heavily outsourced employees from its new frontier locations such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Romania, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil.
Meanwhile, HCLTech’s rivals Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys have started slowing down hiring and focus on utilisation. While TCS added only 821 employees in Q4, Infosys slashed net headcount by 3,611.
HCLTech on April 20 reported its Q4FY23 numbers. Consolidated net profit for the quarter ended March 2023 stood at Rs 3,981 crore, up 10.61 percent against Rs 3,599 crore a year back.
Its revenue from operations for the period stood at Rs 26,606 crore, clocking a growth of 17.74 percent from Rs 22,597 crore.
The profit figure beat estimates but revenue lagged the projections.
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