The top two IT services exporters in the country, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ltd and Infosys Ltd, hired a record 1.85 lakh freshers during the financial year ending March 31, 2022. The record hiring of freshers in these tech companies was seen amid huge demand for IT services as Covid forced many global businesses to go fully remote.
In Q4 ending March 31, 2022, TCS hired 35,209 employees, its highest ever net addition in a quarter. In the full financial year, TCS' net hiring was 103,546, which is another all-time high. Along these, 1,00,000 were freshers. This took TCS' overall employee count to 592,195 in FY22.
Infosys, too, did a net addition of 54,396 employees in the financial year ending March 31, 2022, with around 22,000 employees added in Q4 alone. Infosys hired around 85,000 freshers, taking the overall headcount to 3,14,015 by March 31, 2022.
Both companies plan to go big on hirings in this financial year as well. TCS says it has set a target of hiring 40,000 freshers this year, while Infosys CEO during the company's earnings call on Wednesday said 50,000 freshers will be recruited in FY23.
All good things aside, one area that remains a pain point for these tech services giants is the high attrition rate.
TCS, Infosys, along with other two major IT services firms — Wipro and HCL — are fighting for a limited pool of talent in the Indian tech industry, which has caused a huge spike in the attrition rate in the past three quarters.
TCS reported a huge rise in the attrition rate at 17.4% for FY22 from 7.2% during the previous fiscal. The attrition rate at Infosys touched a whole new level of 27.7% from 10.9% in the corresponding quarter during the previous year.
The companies believe the attrition rate is only going to get worse in this financial year despite several initiatives taken to retain employees.
TCS in its earnings release said its focus is on organic talent development. Infosys CEO Salil Paresh also said the company will scale talent "globally", invest in employees and accelerate innovation.
TCS posted a record net profit of ₹38,327 crore for Q4 FY22, up 14.8% on a year-on-year (Y-o-Y) basis, while its revenue grew 16% Y-o-Y to ₹50,591 crore for the said quarter. Infosys, on the other hand, recorded a 12% YoY rise in profit at ₹5,686 crore in Q4 FY22, with revenue surging 22.7% to ₹32,276 crore.
Meanwhile, the TCS share closed 0.71% or ₹26.15 down at ₹3,664.95 on the NSE on Wednesday. The Infosys share, however, rose 0.49% or ₹8.55 to close at ₹1,751 on the NSE.
