TCS, Wipro, HCL, Infosys On a Recruiting Frenzy in 2022

Despite the third wave of Covid-19, the Indian IT industry is not slowing down. Covid-19 Pandemic's impact on the economy hasn't deterred any of the major IT companies from doubling their employment plans. In fact, the Indian IT services industries aim to hire roughly around 4,50,000 techies in the second half of the fiscal year 2022! 

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TCS, Wipro, and Infosys, the country's three largest employers, plan to add roughly 1 million new staff this year. Last year, the three had hired a record 1.7 lakh employees, compared to just 31,000 in 2020. These recruiting frenzy's primary drivers may be attributed to the rise in the demand for skilled workers and the consequent rise in employee turnover. According to Nasscom, around 4.5 million people are employed in India's IT and BPM industries, still, the supply of software engineers and data scientists is restricted.

IT hiring at a 5-year high!

The software industry, which includes IT companies, BPM (Business Process Management), and MNCs, has always been a major job creator in India, having more than 45 lakh employees. Before 2021, the latest 5-year hiring record for the 6-month period was in 2019 when the top 10 firms added more than 45.6k employees. To have more and more digital marketing services and provide e-commerce services, the urgent hiring demand is reaching newer heights as global enterprises are investing in digital. The experts say that the given numbers may go up to as high as 2 lakh this year.

Source: Times of India

Increasing Focus on Freshers 

Investing in the right personnel and hiring a record number of new engineers has become a priority for IT organizations. They are certain that recruiting from a younger pool of applicants would help them reduce attrition rates. In reality, the number of freshers hired by Indian IT businesses has risen to the highest level in a decade.

“Primarily because of the pandemic, companies across the globe are going for larger-scale IT transformation. They are adopting cloud technologies as well as data analytics, and this is driving demand for talent.” Piyush Pandey, Lead Analyst, Institutional Equities at YES Securities

He added that since the number of experienced people is fixed, company’s will have to hire freshers and train them. “That is the only solution. It will take a couple of quarters before the supply situation improves and they are able to handle the demand environment,” he said. 

Why companies are hiring freshers?

HCL Chief HR Officer Apparao VV stated numerous reasons for high demand of freshers. “We are doing 33% more than we had targeted. The Visa environment, compensation revisions and countries looking inward have put a cap on the talent available in those countries.”

James Friedman of Susquehanna Financial Group (SFG) said demand is also related to infrastructure. With companies shaking hands-on big and lucrative deals, the demand for the appropriate young talent soars, resulting in major hiring sprees.

Infosys won the largest deal from German company Daimler that is estimated at $3.2 billion. TCS signed a major deal with Prudential Financial. Wipro too signed a big deal with German retailer Metro.

Let’s have a look at some of the most promising companies in the coming year: 

1. Wipro

Wipro in its declaration of hiring spree, expects to hire about 30,000 freshers in FY23, as the company strives to ensure that supply is not a constraint in managing the robust demand environment. Due to demand for tech talent, Wipro added that it is on course to onboard over 70% more fresh talent from the campus in FY22 compared to the previous year.

Saurabh Govil, President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Wipro said, “Wipro is looking to hire 30,000 freshers in FY23 while the fresher hiring numbers were pegged at about 17,500 for FY22.” The company is aggressively hiring B.Tech freshers under its ‘Elite National Talent Hunt 2022’ program. The company said on its ad page,“Elite National Talent Hunt 2.0 (NTH) is our freshers hiring program to attract the best of 2022 engineering graduates across the country.”

2. Infosys

India’s second-largest company Infosys announced, while declaring the results for the quarter ending December 2021, that it is planning to recruit more than 55,000 freshers for FY22 as part of its global graduate hiring programme for multiple job roles.

Nilanjan Roy, chief financial officer at Infosys said, “We continue to prioritize investments in talent acquisition and development and have further increased our global graduate hiring program to over 55,000 for FY22 to support our growth ambitions”. 

Giving additional information, Salil Parekh, CEO and MD at Infosys, said, “Our talent strategy continues to be a key focus area marked by efforts to further strengthen employee skilling and well-being while nurturing our workforce to fulfill client requirements.”

3. HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies declared that it plans to double its fresher hiring for the upcoming financial year (FY23). The company said that it will hire 40,000-45,000 freshers for FY23, up from 20,000-22,000 target for FY22.

HCL Technologies Chief Human Resources Officer Apparao V V said, “We expect there to be anywhere between 20,000 to 22,000 of freshers onboarding this year. Our talent strategy has got a big component which is freshers and we definitely are looking ambitiously at onboarding double this number next year in FY23.”

In order to meet the continuous demand and get diversified skill sets, it plans to expand to other countries. HCL Technologies CEO Vijayakumar said, “The company expects to recruit more than 2,000 graduates in the US and would increase its presence in countries like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Romania, Hungary, Costa Rica, etc.”

Ace HCL Interview With These Top 15 Questions Usually Asked By HRs

At the end of the December 2021 quarter, HCL had 197,777 employees with a net addition of 10,143 people.

4. TCS

The largest IT company, TCS hired 43,000 employees in the first half of FY22. TCS did hire 40,000 techies in FY21, and thus keeping in mind the attrition rate, increasing demand, and digital transformation it has decided to add another substantial amount to its already staggering force. The company is looking to add another 35,000 college graduates in the second half of the financial year. 

Milind Lakkar, Chief HR Officer added that the company is in a high-demand environment and that most hiring is happening to satisfy that. “We may have to increase the volume or velocity of our hiring a bit more than what we usually do because of increased attrition,” he said.

5. Larsen & Toubro

L&T Infotech announced to hire 5,500 freshers for the financial year 2022 amid high attrition rate.“We continued to hire last year, we were getting the crème de la crème of the market, and we plan on increasing hiring today because we need to stay competitive and create an exciting workplace for people who can play a bigger role,” said Sanjay Jalona, CEO & MD, L&T.

He further added, “We are building a bigger talent pool via fresher hiring, non-tech hiring, upskilling of in-house talent, and more on the back of broad-based demand from the new normal across industries and newer areas like ESG and cybersecurity.”

According to industry experts, tech companies will continue to maintain such robust hiring plans for the upcoming one or two years. This may result in enormous salary hikes, not to mention an insane demand for software engineers, blockchain engineers, engineering graduates, fresh graduates, solutions architects, cloud architects etc. Hopefully, such hiring sprees will help companies combat the spike in attrition rate, and meet their demands for employees in digital services.

Which IT roles are in demand?

IT sector’s GDP share has grown from 0.4% (in 1992-93) to 8% now. The size of the industry has expanded to USD 194 billion from USD 150 million in 1991, creating huge employment on its way.

As all industries are moving towards digital solutions for their businesses, the most sought-after professionals are:

• Data scientists (1 lakh job openings): An interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, algorithms, processes, and systems for extracting knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data, to develop innovative solutions for application in various domains.
• Full-stack engineers: Full stack developer is an engineer who handles all the work related to servers, databases, systems engineering, and clients.
• Cybersecurity services professionals: Their major responsibility is to protect IT infrastructure, edge devices, networks, and data. Further, they provide engineering solutions to prevent data breaches, to monitor and react to attacks.
• Cloud architects: This includes components and subcomponents involved in cloud computing. These are cloud engineers/cloud professionals having cloud capabilities and can thus work for developing cloud platforms, cloud application development, cloud software, and so on.
• Artificial intelligence experts: People proficient with AI can handle the expert systems that are designed for solving complex problems via reasoning through bodies of knowledge.

Do you know that Accenture alone has listed around 34,000 jobs across different jobs roles including demand for cloud talent, data analytics, big data, and network security? According to a report, upcoming roles such as quantum machine learning (ML) experts could earn as high as INR 14 LPA.

Why is attrition becoming a major concern for IT heads?

Yes, the demands are ever increasing from the tech sector, but one of the side effects which is always there for the company to tackle is to control the attrition rates. With the digitization and ever increasing demand, the employees are lured to better opportunities. According to research firm Gartner, the attrition rate rose from 10% in 2021 to 20 % in 2021. 

During the July-September stretch, attrition at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) — the country’s largest IT firm — was at 11.9% up from 8.6% in the April-June quarter. For Bengaluru-headquartered Infosys, voluntary attrition on the last twelve months trailing (LTM) basis was at 20.1% in the September quarter, compared to 13.9% in the preceding quarter. However, during the period under review, Wipro recorded the highest attrition rate among the top-tier pack at 20.5%, as against 15.5% in Q1. In the September quarter of FY22, Noida-based HCL Technologies’ attrition rate rose to 15.7%, from 11.8% in the June quarter.

All said and done, there is no doubt it will lead to major employment opportunities in the country, thereby bringing a boom in the economy. While the experts say, this demand is likely to be there for the upcoming two to three years, freshers or techies will do best by making hay while the sun shines. With the world balanced on a very delicate scale, it won’t be wrong to say any new turn could lead to a butterfly effect on a massive scale. The world is unpredictable, and so is the IT industry.

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