Infosys to on-board 20,000 freshers in FY21 as COVID-19 freeze lifts, COO Pravin Rao says

India’s second largest IT services firm Infosys hired more than 4,000 lateral hires in the quarter ended April 2020 and will hire more in the coming quarter as well, said UB Pravin Rao, COO.

This comes after a freeze in lateral hiring in April at the back of coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking to media persons after the June quarter results, Rao said, “In terms of lateral hiring, in April there was a general freeze. However we will continue to look for talent in niche areas.”

“In Q1, there was 4,000 plus lateral hiring. The trend will continue going forward and based on the needs we will look at it,” he added.

This is in line with what its peers TCS and Wipro have done. While TCS said it is opening up lateral hiring, Wipro on-boarded close to 7,000 lateral hires for the quarter ended June.

The company, which suspended hikes and promotions in the March quarter,  has upped the variable pay of employees as a reward to employees, said Nilanjan Roy, CFO, Infosys. Also, the company focus on reskilling its existing employees on latest technologies rather than hire to control cost, he added.

For the quarter-ended March 31, the number of offers for both freshers and laterals, were not significant, Rao had said.  Till the December quarter, Infosys recruited over 16,000 laterals and 18,000 freshers.

However at the end of June quarter, where the company reported better than expected results, the lateral hiring have continued. In terms of fresher hiring, the company is looking at 20,000 freshers joining the firm towards later part of this year and early next year.

Attrition

The company also have brought down its voluntary attrition rate to 11.7 percent from 15.3 in the March quarter. The total headcount came down by 3138 to 2,39,233 for the quarter.

The company will stop reporting involuntary attrition, or layoffs, as was the practice earlier. Rao said, “From this quarter we will be disclosing only voluntary attrition for IT services. Because that is what most people in the industry use and that is what makes sense.”

Other firms such as TCS, Wipro and HCL Tech does not split the attrition and the company will now follow the same practice.

For the quarter ending December 2019, the company saw involuntary attrition increase on quarter-on-quarter by 60 basis points. Of the 19.6 percent attrition, involuntary attrition stood at 1.4 percent and the rest were voluntary. For the March quarter, Rao said that the company’s involuntary attrition came down by 50 bps.