L&T Infotech and
as well as and are working on their branding to attract freshers and win lateral hires from the likes of , and . In the three months ended Sept. 30, the wider software services industry clocked an attrition rate of 20% — significantly higher compared to even the previous quarter.
The mid-sized firms see freshers as the way out of this talent crunch.
L&T Infotech, for instance, intends to hire 5,500 engineering graduates during the ongoing fiscal. “We are hiring another 1,000 people on a hire-train-deploy basis,” CEO Sanjay Jalona told ET. The company is also putting in place a plan to hire non-technical people and put them through a six-month training program in order to meet the demand for specific skills.
Similarly, Persistent Systems is tapping into “traditional” engineering talent.
“There are people who are engineers by training who work in other industries. They are seeing their peers in technology getting higher salaries, and they are good at what they do…,” CEO Sandeep Kalra said. “These are the kind of people we are looking at in some percentage to train into the skill sets that we want and deploy.” According to him, hiring from other IT companies is a zero-sum game and not the correct way to tackle the talent crunch.
A pandemic-induced surge in demand for digital transformation brought with it increased deal wins for India’s $45-billion IT services industry, as well as a talent crunch. Supply of software engineers trained in new technologies — AI/ML, Blockchain, Low Code No Code, etc. — fell woefully short of demand. That has forced IT firms to look for “traditional” engineers as well as non-engineering graduates to bridge the gap.
To be sure, companies are actively upskilling their existing workforce, but that isn’t enough to cater to the burgeoning demand. Most mid-sized IT firms have been adding about 1,000 freshers each, every quarter, and expect the hiring pace to sustain over the near- to medium-term.
Mindtree recently announced the Edge program, where it takes on BSc and BCA graduates and helps them earn a Masters degree in software engineering from BITS Pilani.
“We are reskilling our employees and we also have to find other ways (to increase the talent supply),” Mindtree CEO Debashis Chatterjee said. “The Edge program is one such initiative, and Chatterjee said that it was important to make it exciting for potential employees to join the company from the learning potential and perspective it offers.”
Compared to mid-sized peers, Coforge has had lower attrition rates in the past two quarters. The company, formerly known as NIIT Technologies, intends to hire at least six times the number of freshers as it did two years ago.
“Our academy program, where we provide six months of training and actual work experience after onboarding freshers, has been a great success — particularly in areas like low-code development and digital process automation,” Coforge’s Chief Marketing Officer Anuradha Sehgal said. “It (Coforge) has taken its fresher hiring program global, across North America and Europe, in addition to expanding into smaller towns in India.”
“Our push into Tier-III city centres like Kolhapur has also been very successful and we plan to add another Tier-III centre in Central India soon, she said. In the US, the company is also considering hiring high-school STEM graduates for automation-shared service centres.
