IT hiring may be slowing down

The IT industry is likely to hire fewer employees in the coming months, if the recruitment figures revealed by IT giant Infosys as part of its quarterly financial results, announced on Thursday are a guide.

The Infosys’ financial results for December quarter shows that the company has a gross hiring of 9,665 in Q3 over Q2 (September quarter) when it had hired 15,352 employees. In this quarter, Infosys lost 6,389 employees, as a result the net addition remains at 3,266 employees which is 60 per cent less than 8,262 employees added in the previous quarter. The net hiring was even lower than 5,311 people in the same quarter previous year, showing a (YoY) dip of 38 per cent.

The company said that for the quarter ending December 2011 (Q3), its gross revenue stood at Rs 9,298 crore, 31 per cent higher (YoY) than Rs 7,106 in the same quarter last year and was 14.80 per cent higher (QoQ) than the quarter ending September 2011. It also said that the operating margin had improved by 3 per cent owing to the fall in rupee against the US dollar.

Infosys’ campus recruitments have also gone down significantly in this quarter, with the company hiring only 5,792 freshers for the quarter ending December 2011. The figures were 55 per cent more in the quarter ending September 2011, when it recruited 13,034 freshers through campus recruitments.

Although the figures look bleak to potential jobseekers, industry experts maintained that quarterly fluctuation in employment data is no indication of slowdown in recruitment. They further added that fresher hiring was much more in the previous quarter because that was the period when students just out of colleges were recruited after their training period.

Infosys, which has 1,45,088 employees as of December 31, 2011, however, maintained that it was on the way to fulfill its target of hiring 45,000 persons this fiscal and added that the company would  also focus on local hiring.