Infosys to hire 20k students from campuses this year

The country’s second largest IT services firm Infosys is looking to hire around 20,000 freshers from colleges across India this year, according to a top company official.

“Last year we had hired around 20,000 people from college campuses. This year as well, we are looking at hiring around 18,000-20,000 freshers from the colleges,” company’s chief operating officer UB Pravin Rao told in reply to a question from DH.

The company, which has seen a 12% jump in its headcount during 2018-19, hired 70,406 employees, both freshers and laterals, during the year – 34.4% of the initial strength of the company at the end of the year.

However, due to increased attrition in the company, the net increase the company’s headcount stood at a 24,016 – less than half of its gross addition in the head-count. During the financial year, the company saw 46,390 employees – 22.7% of its initial workforce – leaving the company, which it primarily attributed with lack of engagement with employees of the company.

The company has seen higher attrition in employees with two to five years of work experience, according to Rao.

“If you look at this demographic range, the value proposition for this crowd was onsite operations. So that value proportion is gone and we have to come up with a differentiated value proportion,” Rao said.

In a bid to retain the employees, the company is planning to roll out 2,500 promotions this year, with a variable pay out of 85%. It is also planning to give increments of 6% to its off-shore employees and up to 1.5% increments to its on-shore employees.

After taming down the attrition rate from alarming 20.6% in June quarter to 17.8% in December quarter, the company again saw a deterioration of its attrition levels by 50 basis points to 18.3% in the end of the March quarter.

The company has said that there is huge dearth in requisite skill sets in the IT space – a problem shared by many other IT service companies – especially in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) segment.

“On the digital skills – they are very hard to get and there is shortage of it. Even if we want, we are not able to recruit the number of talent we want to,” Rao said.

The company has adopted a two-thronged approach to this situation – by re-skilling its internal employees and hiring experienced talent in digital technologies.