Top 5 Indian IT firms see 79% drop in H1 hiring as TCS faces loss of over 19,700 employees

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Despite modest hiring gains by Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra in the July-September quarter, a steep headcount decline at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) weighed heavily on the overall numbers. The top five Indian IT services firms added a net total of just 2,686 employees during the period, marred by TCS losing over 19,700 people.

This led to the cumulative net addition of H1FY26 plunge by 79.25 percent from H1FY25. TCS, the country’s largest private sector employer, is in the midst of cutting 2% or over 12,000 jobs globally, in a bid to become more agile and future-ready amid rapid disruptions in technology.

The recovering headcount trends for the remaining four IT majors was driven by strong deal wins reported in Q2, steady demand outlook despite macro economic uncertainties, pressures in some pockets of specific sectors and aggressive push to offer and develop advanced AI solutions.

Hiring trends in Q2

As of Q2, TCS lost around 19,755 on a net basis sequentially, its biggest quarterly decline in its history.

Meanwhile, Infosys added 8,203 employees, HCLTech’s headcount grew by 3,489, Wipro added 2,260 sequentially and Tech Mahindra added 4,197 respectively.

Fresher addition commentary

For the full year, TCS plans to hire more than 42,000 freshers, but it doesn’t share quarterly break ups.

As of H1, Infosys has already hired 12,000 freshers, inching closer to its full year target of adding 20,000 freshers. Though HCLTech didn’t declare a set target for FY26 fresher hiring, it had said that it will be hiring more than what it did in the previous fiscal, which was about 7,829.

As of H1, HCLTech has already closed in on that target having onboarded 7,180 freshers.

Ram Sundararajan, Chief People Officer, HCLTech said, "We added 3,489 people in September quarter. That’s an increase of 1.6% which in comparison to the 2.4% revenue growth that we reported -- there’s an increase in revenue per employee.”

"During this quarter we added 5,196 freshers, that’s more than double the number we added in the same quarter last year. If you look at the AMJ and JAS quarter, that’s 7,180 freshers. What we had in H1FY26 is almost 92% of what we had in the full year last year," he added.

Wipro will be hiring 10,000-12,000 freshers in FY26. In Q2, it onboarded about 2,900 freshers despite lower attrition in the previous quarter and better utilisation, said chief human resource officer Saurabh Govil during the company's second-quarter earnings conference on October 16.

In Q1, Wipro had hired 3,000 freshers, taking H1 total to 5,900 freshers.

"We will continue to hire based on demand and look at campuses," Govil said.

He added, "For the freshers, lot of focus is train and hire. We are spending time much before they come onboard by working with campuses, their curriculum, assessing them, and onboarding them. We have tried to shift from hire-and-train to train-and-hire so that it helps us speed up deployment on projects."

Tech Mahindra had earlier said that hiring for this financial year will depend on the demand outlook.

"Visibility is a little bit muddy just now, but we expect it will improve with time, given all the actions that we're taking," Tech Mahindra CEO Mohit Joshi said.

TCS’ stance

Interestingly, despite the massive sequential headcount decline for TCS, Chief HR Officer, Sudeep Kunnumal told Mint that TCS has released only about 1% of its workforce, which is roughly around 6,000 employees as part of a restructuring exercise.

At the same time, the company onboarded 18,500 new employees in the July to September quarter, with all offers honoured. Kunnumal said the company will continue hiring based on market demand, without committing to a fixed number for the 2025-26 fiscal year.