Infosys hires 6,000 freshers in Q3, expects to reach target of 50,000 by end of FY23

We see Infosys navigating the rough waters well. It remains a top pick to be added on correction.

Infosys hired around 6,000 freshers in the third quarter of 2022-23. At the beginning of FY23, the company had given a fresher hiring target of 50,000, and 40,000 of them were hired in the first half of the year.

Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy said the company will meet its annual projection during the year, but did not revise its hiring target. “I think we should be around that number by the time we end the year. We have continued to hire,” he said.

The company has a large fresher pipeline who go through Infosys' training program in Mysore. “They are on bench now. We are training them, reskilling them. In fact that will give us some headroom for growth, looking ahead, so the question partly about do we need to hire more. We have a very substantial bench and I think our utilisation at about 81.7 is one of the lowest we've had. So we have some headroom there,” Roy said.

He added that they have hired a lot of freshers through the year and have been putting them into training.

“Over a period of time, they will start going into production because you can't overnight put a new project and have them with all the freshers. It was an investment we were ready to make because you can't overnight flip the model of putting freshers, and so we are ready to make that investment and then start bleeding them into the production projects and rotate existing headcount. We're not so concerned, over a period of time that will start actually helping us,” Roy said on the company’s utilisation policy.

The IT major has toed its peers in significantly slowing down on addition. Infosys had added 21,171 people in the first quarter of this year but reduced the hiring by more than half in Q2 to 10,032. In Q3, the company added 1,627 people.

HCLTech saw a reduction in net headcount addition — from 8,359 in Q2FY23 to 2,945 in Q3FY23. Tata Consultancy Services saw its headcount reduce from the last quarter by 2,197 employees.

The company’s utilisation came in at 81.7 percent, which they said came as a headwind, and added that the company has a substantial bench.

Attrition continued to trend downwards, with attrition on an LTM basis reducing to 24.3 percent from 27.1 percent sequentially. “Quarterly annualised attrition continued to trend downwards and reduced further by another 6 percent during the quarter… We expect attrition to reduce further in the near-term,” Roy told analysts in the company’s earnings call.