TCS to on-board 78,000 freshers in FY22

TCS

India's largest IT services firm TCS will add a record 78,000 freshers in FY22, up from 40,000 it had give year.

The company has also reappointed Rajesh Gopinathan as CEO for 5 years, from February 21, 2022 to February 27, 2027.

The company added 19,690 employees in the quarter ending September 2021, with attrition increasing to 11.9 percent amid the rising demand for technology professionals.

TCS' attrition stood at 8.6 percent in the last quarter. This is in line with the huge war for talent narrative the industry is witnessing, as the demand for technology professionals is on the rise.

Earlier, the company said that it will hire 40,000 freshers in FY22, the same as that of FY21.

The company's total employee count stood at 528,748 for the September quarter. Milind Lakkad, Chief Human Resources Officer, said in the earnings call that the high attrition is concerning and is expected to stay over the next 2-3 quarters, given the demand environment.

However the company is confident about addressing the supply side challenges given the fresher supply. TCS has on-boarded 43,000 freshers in the last six months, and will add another 35,000 in second half of the year.

"Investing ahead of time in building our own pipeline of talent has helped us overcome supply-side challenges, and meet the execution timelines of our customers’ growth and transformation programs. By focusing on organic talent development and by linking learning with careers, we have kept employee satisfaction levels high. At the same time, we continue to scale up programs like Contextual Masters and Elevate to groom the G&T leaders for the workforce of tomorrow," he added.

TCS registered Rs 46,867 crore in revenues for the quarter, up 16.8 percent year-on-year (YoY) and Rs 9,624 crore in net profits, a 14.1 percent YoY growth, which was below market estimates.

The company signed deals worth $7.6 billion in the second quarter of the year, down from $8.6 billion for the same quarter last year. For the six months ended September 2021, the total contract value of deals signed stands at Rs 15.7 billion, led by increased deal momentum in North America, banking and financial services, retail, and manufacturing.

Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, said, in a statement, “The strong and sustained demand environment is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to position ourselves as the preferred growth and transformation partner for our customers. We are using the growth tailwind to invest in strengthening relevant capabilities and building out a comprehensive portfolio of offerings that caters to a broader set of stakeholders in the enterprise across business cycles, strengthening our brand, and making our business more resilient. We believe this is the most sustainable pathway to create longer-term value for all our stakeholders.”

Since the pandemic, the demand for digital services has increased as enterprises shifted to the cloud and moved online to ensure business continuity. This has resulted in huge demand for such services as companies’ world over are in different stages of their digital transformation journey.

The company crossed 5 lakh employees last quarter and became one of the largest private-sector employers in India. In a recent interview, N Ganapathy Subramaniam, COO, TCS, said that the company can have 1 million employees given its scale organisational structure

According to Subramaniam, who spoke to Moneycontrol recently, "Digitisation work is progressing and the way that clients are started to invest, it is happening in multiple waves." This wave, executives, said will continue over the next few years.