Top Indian IT firms have stepped up fresher hiring for FY22 by an average 30 percent to a combined 1.1 lakh on the back of growing demand as businesses goes digital and increased attrition.
Infosys has said it will hire 35,000 freshers this year, up from 21,000 in FY21. Wipro will add over 12,000 campus hires this fiscal, 33 percent more than it did the previous year. HCL Tech is looking at a figure of 20,000-22,000, up 50 percent from 14,600 in FY21. TCS will offer jobs to 40,000 pass-outs, similar to what it hired in FY21.
The top four IT firms added 48,443 employees in the June quarter and are looking to add more in the coming quarters as well. The demand is growing following robust deal wins as enterprises move to digital and invest more in cloud and cybersecurity.
Robust demand, attrition
The June quarter was about big deals. TCS signed $8.1 billion worth of deals in the first quarter of FY22, Infosys $2.6 billion and Wipro $715 million. HCL Tech’s new deal wins stood at $1.67 billion.
Going by the executive commentary, the demand is sustainable. This means that to execute projects, companies will need a talent pipeline that can be deployed readily.
Rising attrition rate and increased salary costs are not helping the IT firms either.
Wipro’s attrition increased to 15.5 percent in Q1 FY22 from 12 percent in the previous quarter. For Infosys, it stood at 13.9 percent, up from 10.9 percent in the March quarter. HCL Tech’s was up from 9.9 percent to 11.8 percent. While TCS’ attrition continues to be at the lowest at 8.6 percent, the management has shared that the firm expects the number to go up.
This is where the challenge lies. Demand is far outstripping supply and companies are looking to bridge the gap by hiring more freshers.
Also read: TCS, Infosys, Wipro added over 40,000 employees in Q1 FY22 as demand, attrition soar
Hiring freshers
Wipro CEO Thierry Delaporte said, “Growth is our priority and we will ensure that talent supply is not a constraint to our mission.” To cater to the demand the company is now hiring, stepping up its fresher hiring.
The company plans to hire 33 percent more freshers this year than in FY21. To ensure that there are no supply-chain pressures, Saurabh Govil, chief human resources officer, said, “We are hiring an unprecedented number of freshers into the organisation. We will be on-boarding 6,000 freshers in Q2, the highest Wipro has done and will roll out 30,000 offers later this year for freshers to join in FY23.”
According to Govil, the company has a huge pipeline building up to manage the people supply chain. “We will see attrition at the heightened level and a lot of dropouts in the next quarter. But we are confident about managing the situation and this will not affect the revenue growth,” he added.
During the earnings call on July 19, HCL’s chief human resources officer VV Apparao said, “Last year we on-boarded 14,600 freshers globally and this year we are targeting anywhere between 20,000 to 22,000 freshers. I will not be surprised if we even cross that number.”
Infosys Chief Operating Officer UB Pravin Rao said during a recent earnings call that as the demand for digital talent was exploding, rising attrition posed a near-term challenge. “We plan to meet this demand by expanding our hiring program of college graduates for FY22 to around 35,000 globally,” he said.
According to HCL Tech’s Apparao, “They (freshers) don’t have anything to unlearn and it is easy to train them on new-age skills. Also skilling up is possible in the talent pool. As a part of that, we have on-boarded 3,444 in Q1 and Q2 we are targeting 6,000.”
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