Hiring for freshers back in focus

After a brief disruption last year due to the Covid pandemic, fresher hiring by IT services companies is back with a bang.

According to the recent management commentary of top-3 IT services companies of the country, more than one lakh fresh engineering graduates will be given job offers in 2021. These freshers will be joining the company next year.

Market leader Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will give offers to more than 40,000 engineering graduates this year through its campus placement programme. The company, which has exceeded an employee base of five lakh by the end of June quarter of FY22, has given offers to similar number of freshers last year.

Similarly, Infosys plans to hire 35,000 fresh graduates from engineering colleges this year. "As the demand for digital talent explodes, rising attrition in the industryposes a near-term challenge. We plan to meet this demand byexpanding our hiring programme of college graduates for FY 22 to35,000 globally," UB Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer at Infosys has said post their results announcement.

Another IT major Wipro will roll out 30,000 offers to fresh graduates this year. "We will onboard 33 per cent more freshers in FY22, versus the previous year. Overall, we will roll out 30,000 offers to fresh graduates this year, who will join next year," Saurabh Govil, Chief Human Resources Officer at Wipro has said. The strong hiring sentiment is driven by the demand uptick seen in the IT industry. Bagging of large deals and shortage of digital talent in the market are the two key factors driving this trend. After a lull in the attrition during the pandemic, even attrition level of most IT firms is also seen rising in the first quarter.

"The fresher hiring in the IT sector has gone up by 20 per cent from last year to this year. Skill set demands from the industry are in areas of Java Full Stack Developer, Dot Net full stack Developer, IBM Mainframes, Power BI, Oracle Database, SAP, Windows Unix, Cloud Services, Cyber Security, Data Analytics, AI/ML, Deep Learning, Logical ability, Analytics, Networking among others," said Neeti Sharma, cofounder and president of TeamLeaseEdtech.

"Many IT companies are keen at hiring freshers instead of laterals, and thereby the demand to skill the freshers and technical and behavioural skills has been increasing," she added.

Not only large cap IT firms, even mid-tier IT services and engineering services companies are stepping up their hiring efforts in order to bridge the supply gap faced by the industry.

Companies like Mindtree, L&T Infotech, L&T Technology Services, Tech Mahindra are bullish on the hiring trend going ahead.

Apart from hiring in big numbers, employers are also rolling out salary hikes and bonuses to check the attrition. While TCS has rolled out two salary hikes during the last financial year, Infosys has announced its second hike for employees effective from July this year. The first round of salary increases has been done in January, 2021.