Recruitment alert! TCS to hire 40,000 freshers from campuses

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) is an indigenous IT service and consulting multinational company (MNC), headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. While TCS is the 4th largest employer among listed Indian companies, its employee headcount crossed the 5,00,000 mark in the June quarter, with a total workforce of 5,09,058 as of June 30. TCS saw a net addition of 20,409 employees in the quarter which is its highest quarterly net addition ever.

Incorporated in the year 1995, it is a large-cap company operating in 149 locations across 46 countries in the world. The workforce at TCS is very diverse, consisting of people from 155 nationalities and women making up 36.2% of the total workforce. Moreover, the company’s IT Services attrition rate (LTM) was at 8.6% which is the lowest in the industry.

The big hiring plans of TCS

India's biggest IT services company, TCS, will be hiring over 40,000 freshers via campus recruitments in India in the financial year 2021-22. Known as the largest private-sector employer, it had hired 40,000 graduates from campuses in 2020 as well and will do better on that number, according to Milind Lakkad, chief of global human resources. He said that the Covid-19 pandemic-related restrictions do not pose any difficulties for them in hiring and that last year, a total of 3.60 lakh freshers had appeared for an entrance test virtually. He added, “Lateral hiring will also be robust this season. Similarly, the company will also look to improve on the number of trainees hired from American campuses last year.” However, an exact number for those trainees wasn't shared.

How is TCS as a company?

In 2015, TCS was ranked 64th in the Forbes World's Most Innovative Companies ranking, making it both the highest-ranked IT services company and the top Indian company. In 2018, it was ranked 11th in the Fortune 500 (India). In the same year, TCS became the 1st Indian IT company to reach USD 100 billion in market capitalization and 2nd Indian company (only after Reliance Industries in 2007) on the Bombay Stock Exchange to have achieved this market capitalization as it stood at USD 102.6 Billion. In 2016-2017 parent company Tata Consultancy Services Ltd owned 72.05% of TCS, and more than 70% of Tata Sons dividends were generated by TCS. However, in March 2018, Tata Sons decided to sell stocks of TCS worth USD 1.25 billion in a bulk deal.

What is the salary for freshers in TCS?

Annually, TCS fresher trainee salary, in India, is INR 3.1 Lakh for employees with work experience ranging from less than 1 year to 6 years. Overall, the fresher trainee salary at TCS ranges between INR 1.9 Lakhs to INR 3.7 Lakhs. This salary is said to be 72% more than the average fresher trainee salary in India. Recently, according to reports, TCS had doubled the salaries for some freshers increasing it to more than 6 LPA.

Direct from the executives’ desk

TCS's chief executive and managing director, Rajesh Gopinathan, said that it often gets asked if the organization is too large to be handling so many employees. On this, he said that the way it is structured makes it possible to handle from a management and nimble-footedness perspective. TCS has divided down the organization into small, autonomous entities with support from the top which helps take care of challenges, pointing out that several entities like the railways, armed forces, and political parties function with large pools of people in this way.

The company's chief operating officer (COO), N Ganapathy Subramaniam, said that the Indian talent is "phenomenal" given their skill sets and the work culture. It is a boon that there is no dearth of talent supply in the country. He also disagreed with concerns about its cost.

Milind Lakkad, Chief of Global Human Resources said that a lot of planning goes into hiring for campus recruitments and their hiring spree is not 'just-in-time' hiring, as when a business deal gets signed up it typically takes over 3 months before a resource gets on the project. The company expects very low attrition of 8% to go up once the situation normalizes, stating that the normal levels are between 11% and 12%. He added that this is done so that even if the attrition levels go up, the company's operating model would ensure that the work or the margins are not impacted.

TCS's newly appointed chief financial officer, Samir Seksaria, said that even though the company expects discretionary spending to normalize by the end of the fiscal year, they are a small subset of its overall expenditure. There are other levers to compress costs as well stressing the fact that, structurally, there are no deterrents to the aspired operating profit margin band of 26% to 28%, which was missed in the 1st quarter.