TCS layoffs: Chief HR opens up on figures circulating amid restructuring exercise - ‘Not factual, extremely exaggerated’

TCS layoffs: India's largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Chief HR Officer Sudeep Kunnumal, on Thursday, 9 October 2025, said that the company has ‘released’ 1% or 6,000 employees as part of its restructuring exercise.

“As we speak today, we are close to one per cent of people, that we have released in mid and senior level, whom we could not redeploy in the right role,” he said, according to a PTI report.

On the topic of whether 1% translates into 6,000 people of the workforce, Kunnumal said, “Yes, right at the mid and senior level segment.”

The CHRO Sudeep Kunnumal on Thursday also dismissed the ‘extremely exaggerated numbers’ which are circulating in media reports. The human resource head also urged people to disregard these numbers.

According to the news agency report, TCS CHRO Kunnumal also said that the company is not chasing a number for the restructuring.

Should the numbers be disregarded?

Responding to a question on the layoffs at a potential scale of 50,000-80,000 people, TCS CHRO Kunnumal said “a lot of these numbers are not factual, are extremely exaggerated” and “should be disregarded”.

According to a statement issued by the IT workers' union, Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), TCS reported a closing headcount of 593,314 employees in the second quarter of the financial year 2025-26, compared to 613,069 employees in the first quarter of the fiscal year.

“This represents a net reduction of 19,755 employees in just one quarter,” the IT workers' union said in the statement.

The Chief HR Officer noted that the IT company has hired 18,500 people in the July to September quarter, highlighting that all the offers made have been honoured.

“As an organisation, we will continue to honour all the offers,” said Sudeep Kunnumal.

TCS hiring target

TCS CHRO Sudeep Kunnumal, responding to the question on whether the company plans to stick to its over 40,000 people hiring target for the 2025-26 fiscal year, said that the company will hire people based on the ‘business demand’ in the market.

“I don't want to give you a number...based on business demand, we will support and we will try to bring the best of the talent for our organisation to shape the journey,” said the CHRO, cited in the agency report.

The company will also reportedly pay a higher quarterly bonus or variable elements compared to what was paid in previous quarters.

“Basically, it covers all the people who have been with our organisation, who are entitled for the quarterly bonus, except maybe for new joinees... but it covers practically every one... normally, at the junior level we have been paying 100 per cent, which is what will continue and for seniors, we will pay a higher amount, which is again based on the individual and unit performance,” he said.

TCS layoffs

Mint reported earlier that TCS announced plans to cut the jobs of nearly 12,000 employees, or around 2% of its global workforce, in the 2025-26 fiscal year. The IT major aims to focus on restructuring plans amid the push for artificial intelligence (AI).

“What we had communicated when we initiated this exercise, is that we will do this with a lot of empathy and respect. And I want to say with conviction and confidence that we did that, we created dedicated teams to have extreme empathetic conversations, to be able to help them with that. We did some benchmark on severance packages for the people (who were affected),” said the CHRO, as per the report.

TCS posted a 1.4% YoY growth in its consolidated net profit to ₹12,075 crore for the July-September period, compared to the same period the previous fiscal year's ₹11,909 crore levels, according to the official BSE filing on Thursday, 9 October 2025.