TCS headcount has crossed the 500,000 mark. Here's how it hires and retains employees

India’s largest information technology (IT) services provider, Tata Consultancy Services, popularly known by its acronym TCS, has crossed the five-lakh employee milestone.

That makes it the second-largest employer in the country after the Indian Railways – and that’s saying a lot.

In addition, the company continues to hire freshers, at least 40,000 in FY22, yet retaining its attrition at 8.6 percent, the lowest in the industry.

How does it balance so much and so well?

Ask Rajesh Gopinathan, CEO, TCS, on achieving the milestone, and he says, rightly, that there are not too many organizations this size.

“I grew up in a railway colony and I used to say that it is not a matter of 400,000 and 500,000, there are not too many organisations that size. We are going through it as a living experiment,” he points out.

Unlike sectors like retail, which employ lakhs of people and the talent level goes down, the TCS case is different. “This is a space that is very exciting for us and we are focused on it. We are continuously exploring to see what we can do to leverage this size. How do we best make use of it,” says Gopinathan.

However, keeping such a large organization is complex. How does TCS not only manage to retain employees but also stay nimble?

“Keeping the organization nimble is the core of our organizational structure. It is to keep on breaking the organization into small autonomous entities that can operate in a fairly independent manner with a supportive ecosystem, which takes away some of the volatility of the environment,” Gopinathan explains.

That alone isn’t enough though, given the scale of the company. According to TCS employees, it is a combination of factors.

Consider this. TCS is one of the largest recruiters from campuses. During the earnings call on July 8 after the announcement of Q1 FY22 results, Milind Lakkad, Chief Human Resources officer, said that the company will hire 40,000 freshers this year, if not more.

This recruitment is not confined to India but also, the globe.

Given the large fresher intake, the company has invested heavily in training and development initiatives to get freshers ready for projects in a short time.

One such initiative to cut down training time is through the platform FrescoPlay, which uses analytics to design individual-focused training programmes.

According to sources Moneycontrol spoke to, the idea is to deploy freshers immediately into projects rather than spending time training them once they come on board.

Secondly, the company extensively hires through NQT (National Qualifier Test), an assessment platform designed by TCS iON that measures the candidates’ cognitive ability, and skills relevant to their job.

People who are in their final and pre-final year, with up to two years of work experience, can apply for the test. Apart from Tata group companies like TCS and Titan, other firms such as Happiest Minds use NQT for hiring.

TCS has built up a vast database of candidates through NQT that it can leverage for hiring needs in the future. The NQT, which is open for freshers with less than two years of experience across India, was conducted on May 1 and 13 this year.

The other important aspect is flexibility in roles that the company offers to employees, says a TCS veteran, who has been working in the company for close to 20 years now. It gives employees room to choose and train in the domain and technology of their interest at any point in time, and the opportunity to be deployed in those projects.

Take Venkat, who has been working in the company for over a decade now. Over the course of his work, he has moved to multiple roles, starting with Java, then to machine learning, and now cloud architecture. He has worked on both internal and client projects and learnt in the process, an opportunity, which he doubts any other workplace offers.

Another employee, Vinod, who has put in over a decade of experience in TCS, says: “Even before FrescoPlay, we had internal platforms, where employees can register and upskill or cross train in any technologies free of cost. At that time, not many companies were making it free for all employees. TCS has been doing this for a long time.”

This flexibility is a function of large and diverse projects the company handles, and internal products and platforms that TCS builds inhouse.

Unlike its global rival Accenture, and local peers such as Wipro, which in addition to building in-house products make acquisitions that complements its portfolio, TCS has been building digital products and platform solutions in-house for its clients. It would not be a stretch to say that the company’s robust digital portfolio has been built from scratch!

This also gives the employees more opportunities to work on multiple technologies, says Vinod.

At the end of the day, it is about how an organization structures itself, no matter the size. Says CEO Gopinathan: “We have been facing questions that we are too large… There are organisations that work efficiently, be it railways or armed forces. The question is how we structure ourselves to be efficient and work in a dynamic way.” He’s hit the nail on the head.