India’s third largest IT services major HCLTech has tweaked its fresher hiring strategy. Not quantity, but quality and specialisation will determine the candidate’s eligibility, also promising a 4X higher pay package than regular fresher hires.
The company is internally calling this group of freshers, the "elite cadre", reflecting the need for IT companies to rethink hiring as artificial intelligence (AI) and its adjacent new-age technologies such as data analytics and cybersecurity practice disrupts the industry.
Speaking at HCLTech’s first quarter earnings conference, Ram Sundararajan, chief people officer said, “In the previous two quarters, I have been talking about the focus on freshers being hired more around specialisation not necessarily about the numbers. The percentage of freshers we are bringing on board on the basis of specialisation is gradually increasing.”
“When we talk about specialisation, we talk about an elite cadre where the compensation levels for freshers are significantly higher. For instance, in services business, the elite engineers we bring onboard are paid up to 3X higher than the regular fresher cadre. In our software business, it is up to 4X higher,” Sudararajan added.
He called out some of the capability units that will look to hire these specialised freshers. These include data and AI, digital engineering practice, cybersecurity practice, enterprise skills.
Going by the current trends, the company is expecting to have about 15-20 percent of the freshers hired this fiscal year to be in this elite cadre, while it is open to hire more but the focus will be on quality over quantity.
Overall, HCLTech will be hiring more number of freshers in FY26 as compared to what it added in FY25, that was about 7,000.
Meanwhile, HCLTech is also implementing a company-wide restructuring plan in FY26 driven by business needs and AI impact. The company said it is ramping down employee base in offshore units, and that might cause a planned headcount reduction.
In Q1, the company reported a net reduction of 269 employees during the June quarter (Q1FY26), bringing its total workforce to 2,23,151.
The company had added 2,665 employees in the preceding quarter.
Despite the marginal decline in headcount, HCLTech onboarded 1,984 freshers in Q1.
Voluntary attrition on a last twelve months (LTM) basis stood at 12.8 percent, unchanged from the same period last year.
HCLTech reported its Q1 earnings on July 14, which saw 10% fall in consolidated net profit at Rs 3,843 crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2025. The firm reported consolidated net profit of Rs 4,257 crore in the year-ago period.
This comes at a time when the IT services industry is grappling with demand slowdown due to macroeconomic uncertainties and global trade tensions.
The IT firm's consolidated revenue from operations rose 8% to Rs 30,349 crore in Q1FY26 as against Rs 28,057 crore in Q1FY25.
Operating margin for the quarter has plunged to 16.3% in Q1, sequentially down by 160 bps from 17.9% in Q4FY25.
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