The Hindu Business Line : Infosys bullish, to exceed hiring target

Bangalore Jan. 13 Bullish on long-term prospects, Infosys is gearing up to bid for any opportunities that are likely to come up while tracking the economic revival in major markets such as the US and Europe over the next one to two years. The company, which will exceed its hiring target of 25,000 for the current fiscal year, has made some 20,000 campus offers for fiscal 2009-10.

Infosys has already despatched about 18,000 offer letters to prospective employees. “We have another 2,800 offers to be made. We will certainly honour all the offer letters,” said Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, Head of HRD, education and research at Infosys. However, the company is yet to decide on the number of lateral (experienced) employees it plans to add next year. “Though we said in the beginning of this fiscal that we would hire about 25,000 people, in our estimate our hiring will go up to 27,000 by March 31, 2009,” Mr Pai said.

Tough calls

For the December quarter, Infosys and its subsidiaries added 5,597 employees on a gross basis, much lower than the previous quarter’s 10,117. Net employee addition stood at 2,772 for the quarter. Attrition declined to 11.8 per cent in December, from 12.8 per cent in the September quarter. Of the 3,225 employees who left the company in the December quarter, 1,079 were asked to leave due to non-performance during their training.

Mr Pai said the tolerance for non-performers was non-existent today. “In boom-time, non-performers were accepted by the industry as there was a shortage of manpower. Now, non-performers, people who don’t work hard and whose conduct is not good, are being shown the door. Cleaning up of the system is happening,” he said.

Training period

Infosys has also extended the training period for freshers from 16 weeks to 24 weeks so that the employees learn an additional language and become much more versatile.

Employee utilisation, excluding trainees, dropped to 74.5 per cent during the quarter, down 2.2 percentage points compared to a year ago.

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