TCS says lateral onboarding delayed due to project budgets, to honour all offers made

India's largest IT company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said on July 12 that there have been delays in onboarding of associates due to the project's budget constraints, making the company's first comment after Moneycontrol reported that the onboarding of lateral recruits has been delayed across experience bands by months.

In response to a question at the company's Q1FY24 earnings conference on July 12, Chief Human Resources Officer Milind Lakkad said that it will continue to honour all offers it has made.

"There are certain delays because of the environment we are in because of the project delays...things are not getting progressed [in some cases]. As a result of that, the onboarding of those associates also gets delayed. In certain cases that is getting delayed, yes, but that is purely based on the project's budget situation. I commit today that we are going to honour all offers," Lakkad said.

Moneycontrol first reported on the delays in onboarding lateral hires by TCS on July 10. Joinees with experience anywhere from less than two years to up to 15 years were told that their date of joining will be postponed by a quarter or three months amidst project commencement delays, those impacted told Moneycontrol.

Over 200 lateral recruits across cities such as Bangalore, Pune, Kochi, Bhubaneswar, Delhi NCR, and Indore, to name a few, are getting impacted by these deferments.

The majority of these joinees got their offer letters between January and April and their onboarding was already delayed by a month initially. Further, many of them got two to three subsequent new joining dates before receiving a fresh email on July 10, informing them that their joining has been pushed to the fourth week of October.

These recruits who left their previous organisations will now be without a job for the next few months.

This comes less than a month after the IT services behemoth grappled with a hiring scam wherein it had to sack six employees from its Resource Management Group (RMG) for allegedly accepting bribes from partnering staffing firms in exchange of giving them preferential treatment and business while hiring and deploying temporary associates on projects. Three other employees of the RMG are still under investigation. The six staffing firms found to be involved were also banned.