Hexaware to hire more than 1,000 freshers this year, sees double-digit growth

CEO, Hexaware

IT services firm Hexaware Technologies will hire more than 1,000 freshers as it expects teen double-digit growth for FY21. The company is also hiring laterals aggressively to meet the sharp increase in demand, said Hexaware CEO R Srikrishna.

The hiring would be in the area of digital skills such as cloud, full-stack developers, data and cognitive skills.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Srikrishna said the company is seeing supply-side challenges as the demand environment has gone through a sharp recovery cycle. “We are at a point where we cannot keep up with demand,” he said.

This is in sharp contrast to the situation the IT sector witnessed when the pandemic struck. Demand declined and clients were cautious about spending.

Hexaware reported 1.7 percent decline in revenues sequentially for the quarter ending March 2020. The company’s exposure to travel and hospitality, which accounted for about 8 percent of its revenues, was a concern. Before delisting in November 2020, the company reported $214 million in revenue, up 2.9 percent sequentially.

Three quarters down, except for the travel segment, the other sectors are growing as clients accelerate their digital transformation journey. Its largest revenue-generating sectors are banking and financial services (38 percent), healthcare and insurance (22 percent), and manufacturing and consumer (17.3 percent).

“Cloud is the most important driver for growth,” he added.

With demand outstripping the supply, the company is now in aggressive hiring mode. “We are aggressively hiring as much as we can, from a variety of sources,” Srikrishna said.

With remotely working, the location of the talent is less of a constraint. “In January 2021 alone we hired 700 people and that is a lot when we have just begun the year,” he said.

The company also has a robust fresh hiring plan in place when it plans to take more than 1000 people. At the end of September 2020, the company employed about 19,407 people.

Talking about the company's work-from-home strategy, Srikrishna said the employees would continue to work from home till they get vaccinated. However, there are no plans to give up real estate spaces though the company is likely to go slow on expanding its real estate footprint.

On the involvement of Baring PE Asia, its promoter in the operations, Srikrishna said that it continues as it is and the delisting has not changed anything for the firm.