Infosys first major IT outsourcer to outline a cut in fresher hiring as automation scales

“INFY (Infosys) expects to hire fewer freshers in the future, enabled by higher productivity," said BMO Capital Markets analysts Keith Bachman, Bradley Clark, Adam J. Holets, and Jonathan Stein, in a 16 December note, citing interaction with the company’s management.

“INFY also envisions potential for revenue per headcount to increase," the research firm said. “Management expects headcount to grow modestly over the next few years due to increasing employee productivity."

The Bengaluru-based company becomes the first information technology (IT) services provider to explicitly forecast a decline in entry-level jobs as the sector grapples with a slowdown due to AI disruption, a decrease in client spending led by macroeconomic uncertainty, and visa curbs in the US.

Fresher hiring has been muted over the last two years, a setback for about 1.3 million students graduating from thousands of engineering colleges in the country. The country’s largest engineering colleges expect IT outsourcers to hire fewer freshers for the batch of 2026, Mint reported on 17 November.

To be sure, Infosys expects to hire more fresh graduates in the ongoing fiscal.

“We had given guidance in terms of the fresh hiring for the year, and we had said 20,000 is what we expect," Jayesh Sanghrajka, chief financial officer of Infosys, said during the company’s post-earnings press conference on 16 October. “We have hired in the first half, 12,000-plus freshers already. So we are well on our track to hire close to 20,000 this year."

Infosys, whose revenue increased 3.85% year-over-year to $19.28 billion in FY25, hired 15,000 out-of-college candidates in the last fiscal, according to its disclosures.

AI skills in demand

The company’s commentary to reduce fresher hiring in the coming financial years is in contrast to the outlook of its peers. For now, peers Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and HCL Technologies Ltd have guided for an increase in entry-level intake.

“We have been very vocal about the fact that we actually see freshers and AI as a very complementary strategy," Jatin Dalal, chief financial officer at Nasdaq-listed Cognizant, said during an analyst call on 29 October.

“And we believe that expanding the pyramid at the bottom in our industry really helps us accelerate the organization's journey on AI," he said. “So from that context, we more than doubled this year, the number of freshers we took last year to this year, and that journey will continue."

Cognizant ended 2024 with $19.74 billion, up 2% from the previous year. The company followed the January-December financial calendar, while homegrown IT services providers follow the April-March reporting.

“Infosys has a view that it will quickly eliminate the need for L1 and L2 resources (freshers)," said Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder of Everest Group, a Dallas-based IT research firm. “Whereas Cognizant believes that this shift will happen over a longer period of time."

Mumbai-based TCS, however, will be more selective, focusing on hiring AI-native freshers.

“...They really know how to use AI very organically. And what we have done is our intake of trainees, fresh trainees from universities, we have actually doubled on that," said Aarthi Subramanian, chief operating officer of TCS, during the company’s analyst day on 17 December.

TCS, which ended last year with $30.18 billion in revenue, hired about 42,000 freshers last fiscal. It has not specified the number of people it would hire this year.

Third-largest HCL Technologies Ltd is also expected to hire more entry-level graduates this year.

The Noida-based company added 5,196 freshers in the quarter ended September, which is more than double from the same period last year. For now, its management has said that it intends to increase hiring of freshers.

“We started the year with a plan that we will do a significantly higher fresher addition this year compared to last year," said Ramachandran Sundararajan, chief people officer of HCLTech, during the company’s post-earnings press conference on 13 October.

“If you look at what you have done during H1, that's almost 92% of what we did in the entire year last year," he said. “We are on track to do what we planned to do this year in terms of fresher relations."

HCLTech outlined plans to recruit about 12,000 freshers this fiscal and hired 8,000 graduates just out of college in the previous financial year.

Fourth-largest Wipro is expected to hire nearly 12,000 freshers in FY26. The company plans to continue hiring laterally and from colleges, its management said during the earnings call.

TCS ended September with 593,314 employees, while Cognizant had a headcount of 349,800, Infosys 331,991, HCLTech 226,640 and Wipro had 235,492 employees.

Queries emailed to TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, HCLTech, and Wipro remained unanswered at the time of publishing.

“Most Tier-1 techs reiterated commitment to their respective fresher hiring targets, while recalibrating their talent strategy to target skills and specializations rather than sheer numbers," said Axis Capital analysts Manik Taneja and Rohit Thorat, in a note dated 17 December.

For Infosys, growth has been promising. The company ended the April-September period with $10 billion in revenue, up 4.26% from a year earlier. It outpaced three of the big five peers–only HCLTech, which ended with $7.2 billion in the first half, grew faster at 5.6%.