TCS has over 1.25 lakh mid, senior level employees serving it for over 10 years

Employees of Tata Consultancy Services at the middle and senior level who have been with the company for 10 years or more count over 1.25 lakh, said Milind Lakkad, the company’s Chief Human Resources Officer.

“They have been central to our ability to culturally and operationally integrate all the fresh talent we brought on board and ensuring that the project work outcomes and customer experiences continue to be the best in class,” Lakkad told analysts following the company announcing its results for Q3Fy23.

The company, which reported a reduction of 2,197 employees during the third quarter of FY23 sequentially, said on January 9 that its workforce as of December 2022 was 6,13,974. The company’s net addition has been declining each quarter in FY23.

Speaking to analysts, Chief Executive Officer Rajesh Gopinathan said the company’s incremental hiring must be seen in the context of the capacity they have built up so far.

“We have significantly invested in building up capacity in 2021, tried as much as possible to bypass the industry's hire-from-each-other attrition cycle and focused on hiring at entry level and invested in training and cross-training our resources. That investment has hit our productive capacity and stood us in the stead. So, the incremental hiring that we saw this year should be seen in the context of what we've done in the last year also. And overall, we are very comfortable with where we are with our net headcount,” he said.

He added that there should be a more normal hiring trend, and they expect gross hiring in the range of 1.25-1.5 lakh for the year. Along with an expected normalisation of attrition levels,  Gopinathan said they will have sufficient capacity to take care of growth. “Then we can keep bringing in shorter-term hiring to take care of demand as it unfolds,” he said.

Lakkad said that net hiring last year was “significantly ahead” of revenue growth. The focus this year is to utilise that excess capacity and make the new hires productive, he said.

Attrition also saw a slight decline from the previous quarter to 21.3 percent from 21.5 percent on a last-twelve-month basis.

“LTM attrition in IT Services was at 21.3 percent, slightly down quarter-on-quarter, but still very elevated as it reflects the high levels of churn in the prior quarters. Our quarterly annualised attrition on the other hand, fest by nearly 6 percent in Q3, as we expect it to steadily trend down over the coming quarters,” Lakkad said.