DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 20 April
Indian IT services companies continue to shed employees with a fall in headcount in consecutive quarters.
The quarter ended March 2024 saw a reduction in the employee base of large IT firms including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro. This was the first time in more than 20 years that these top three firms witnessed a fall in their headcount.
According to the data shared by these three companies, they together saw employee count plunged by 63,759 in the last fiscal year (FY24).
India’s biggest IT services company, TCS’ employee count FY24 dropped by 13,249 employees. In the fourth quarter ended March, there was a loss of 1,759 employees.
Infosys headcount fell sharply by 25,994 employees to take the total count to 3,17,240 in FY24. The employee count fell by 5,423 for the Bengaluru-headquartered company.
For the full fiscal, Wipro’s total employee strength dropped by 24,516 to 2,34,054 as of March 2024. During the fourth quarter, Wipro registered a drop of 6,180 employees.
Importantly, except TCS, both Infosys and Wipro have indicated that hiring is likely to remain subdued in the current fiscal year.
“Our hiring models have changed significantly over the years. We are now doing more than half of the hiring off campus and the rest from campuses. We have not decided yet about the number of campus hiring for this year. We have a headroom to improve our employee utilization levels to around 84-85 per cent from the current 82 per cent. Hiring will depend on demand environment,” Chief Financial Officer of Infosys, Jayesh Sanghrajka has said during the post-results press conference.
Similarly, Wipro has indicated that it would prioritise onboarding to those freshers who have been given offer letters in past years over fresher hiring from campuses this year.
“We are first honouring our offers to those freshers to whom we have given offer letters earlier. So, in fresher hiring front, our focus is to onboard those who have earlier received offer letters,” Saurabh Govil, Chief HR Officer of Wipro has said.
TCS is the only company among the three that is going to campuses for fresher hiring. The company has also kickstarted its National Qualifiers Test through which it selects freshers from engineering colleges across India.
In the coming quarters, all big IT firms are looking at improving their employee utilization levels. HR experts in the know said that the over-hiring done in the post-COVID period is now getting neutralised through the shedding of employees. Unless the demand environment improves, hiring in big numbers will remain a far cry in the Indian IT industry.
