The Indian IT sector has hired an estimated 350,000-360,000 freshers in FY22 across 30 plus companies. This accounts for around 14-18 per cent of the total headcount of the top IT companies.

Of this, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) added 77,000 freshers, Infosys hired 41,000-42,000, Cognizant 33,000, HCL 15,787, Capgemini 17,000, Wipro 14,000-15,000 and Tech Mahindra added 10,000, according to data from UnearthInsight, a metrics benchmarking and market intelligence firm.

All the top firms have also revised their fresher hiring target, amidst an uptrend in attrition with 22.3 per cent in Q3, which stood at 19.5 per cent in last quarter and in Q4 it’s expected to be between 22 to 24 per cent.

Experts however, expect the situation to start improving in FY23 as it estimated that attrition will come down to 16-18 per cent.

“Over the past two-three years fresher hiring has been limited, so when demand increased in FY22, the industry was hit by talent shortage. Quarterly appraisal will happen around Q4, and by Q1FY23, there will be more freshers in supply in the market. Since we believe that the demand will remain stagnant going forward in FY23, the attrition rate will eventually come down to 16-17 per cent,” Piyush Pandey, Lead Analyst - Institutional Equities, YES Securities told BusinessLine.

“We can observe an 8-12 per cent Average Wage Hikes by Tier I and Tier II IT Competitors along with ~15-20 per cent of the employee promotions for retention,” the UnearthInsight report said.

Record revenue growth

The Indian IT industry is expected to report 19-21 per cent revenue growth in FY22, highest for the sector touching $230-240 billion. This is largely driven by the growth amongst the top 15 to 20 Indian IT services firms with robust GCC and captive industry growth.

This year, the Tier-II firms were growing much faster on the back of pricing, agility, and partnerships.

As of Q3, cloud practises in the Indian IT services firms grew by 20 to 30 per cent, fuelled by the next generation services such as ER&D, cloud, and data modernisation.

The report noted, “Within the cloud, AWS is the fastest growing product segment, followed by Azure and IBM Infra. At TCS, Infosys, Wipro, TechM and HCL practices like Cloudstrike, Snowflake, GCP, CLOUDNXT.NOW and Alibaba are emerging fast.”

Software products and platforms generated $5 billion revenue for Indian IT services firms. Of this, TCS alone generated $3 billion, which is around 12-15 per cent of its total revenue.

Gaurav Vasu, Founder and CEO, UnearthInsight said, “Despite the nationwide severe pandemic wave in last few weeks, the IT Industry growth outlook remains intact and this financial year industry is likely to achieve best ever revenue growth and will continue to add workforce as per the estimates... On technology side, Key IT firms are witnessing excellent growth in their Cloud and Product & Platform business whereas penetration of low-code and no-code platforms is gaining significant momentum.”

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