TCS to continue hiring spree despite economic slowdown
TCS to continue hiring spree despite economic slowdown
Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) has offered jobs to 43,600 students through campus recruitment who will join in 2012-13. The number, the highest ever for the company, may be an indication that volume growth may make a comeback towards the latter half of 2012.
India’s largest information technology (IT) services company by revenue, which had 226,751 people on its rolls as on 31 December, had made 38,000 campus offers for the current fiscal year. Typically, about 70% of all campus offers are accepted.
“We’ve made 43,600 campus offers and the rest of the hiring plan will be decided once the business planning for the next fiscal is done, which should happen by the first week of March," said Ajoy Mukherjee, executive vice-president and head, global human resources, TCS.
He didn’t speculate on the overall hiring number for the next fiscal year, but if the October-December quarter is an indication, when lateral hires (6,763) accounted for 36% of the overall hiring (18,907), TCS could end up hiring at least as much as it did this year in the next.
Typically, campus offers for a fiscal year are made in the first half of the previous fiscal to enable freshers to join the company in the April-June quarter, after which they go through a period of training and are ready for deployment during October-December.
TCS added 40 clients during the third quarter and signed 10 large deals. Still, volume growth dropped to 3.2% for the quarter, almost half of the 6.25% registered in the trailing quarter.
On Tuesday, it echoed the cautious stance adopted by bellwether Infosys Ltd, which last week lowered its outlook for this fiscal. TCS does not give projections.
“A significant majority of our clients have closed their budgets and it’s a mixed bag," TCS’ CEO and managing director N. Chandrasekaran said after announcing the results on Tuesday.
Mukherjee said that onshore hiring would pick up going forward, given political sensitivities in the US, which goes to the polls in 2012, but expected high rejection rates for visas to that country to continue.
“We hired 1,200 people in the US in the last fiscal year, but have already clocked 1,200 hires in the first three quarters of the current fiscal. We’ll surely be hiring more in the fourth quarter," he said.
john.k@livemint.com
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