Net employee addition in top 3 IT firms declines YoY in FY20

At the end of FY20, total employees in TCS stood at 4,48,464, Infosys: 2,42,371 and Wipro: 1,82,886.

This decline is despite the momentum the firms saw in the first half of the year. First quarter of FY20 saw record hiring in the IT sector. Business Standard reported that close to 85,000 freshers were hired in Q4 FY19, the highest in a single quarter in the last six years.

Take for instance the top three firms. For FY19, TCS hired 30,000 freshers, its highest in the last five years in Q1. Infosys handed out more than 34,000 offers to both freshers and laterals between April and December 2019. Wipro said it had hired 9,000 freshers between April and September 2019 and about 12,000 in FY20.

IT staffers told Moneycontrol that the worst was over and the numbers reflect the confidence the companies have in terms of new age projects though the numbers will never be as huge as a decade ago. Rituparna Chakroborty, co-founder, Teamlease, an IT staffing firm, said in an earlier interaction that hiring will never be in mass numbers as it had been a decade back, but more niche.

In its early days, IT firms recruited freshers in thousands from campuses. However, hiring now has become more or less niche as firms are looking for people with new age skills such as cloud, AI and machine learning.

Grim hiring outlook for FY21 Given the novel coronavirus pandemic, hiring is likely to dip further in FY21. All three IT companies will not have any new hires. Infosys, Wipro and TCS said that they would honour all the offers that has been given out so far in FY21. TCS has issued 40,000 offers and Infosys 35,000.

Wipro will defer on-boarding of freshers, whereas TCS and Infosys will start on-boarding after the students graduate. The graduation will likely to be pushed to July as the final year exams have been postponed due to COVID-19.