Employee hiring by the top software companies slowed considerably in the June quarter given the global slowdown. However, companies are confident of bouncing back in the remaining period of the year.

In fact, for the top two (Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys), it was the lowest employee net addition in the last four quarters.

Wipro bounced back in the June quarter after lower hiring in the March quarter. In fact, the net hiring of Wipro was more than double that of Infosys.

Net addition for TCS in June was 4,962 compared to more than double the number in the previous three quarters.

Infosys’ net hiring was only 1,157.

For Cognizant, which in the June quarter overtook Infosys as the second largest software company, the hiring in June was better than March but no way near its high of 7,000-plus in December 2011 and 12,000-plus in the September 2011 quarters.

To pick up pace

Despite the drop in hiring numbers, both TCS and Infosys were confident of hiring more as the year progresses.

“We model our recruitment to the demand. At the same time a lot of recruitment we do is of college freshers and is done early on. The cycle time is about 18 months. We had already given offers to 23,000 people last year to join this year starting July,” S.D. Shibulal, CEO, Infosys, told analysts while discussing the company’s June quarter financial results.

“As our principle is to honour all he commitments, which we have given, we are going ahead with the joining of these employees, who will be in training for six months. We have spaced it out in a way which is relevant to us. The conversion rate is usually about 80 per cent, which means we will have about 18,000-20,000 people join between now and the next 12 months,” he said.

For TCS, with campus trainees joining the company from the beginning of July-September quarter, lateral hiring accounted for 75 per cent of total hiring in the first quarter

E. Balaji, CEO, Randstad India, a recruitment company, said that typically there is a drop in the numbers of gross addition and net addition of employees in the June quarter as it is not a peak hiring period for Indian IT majors and there is increased attrition. The human resources teams get the recruitment mandate and budgets approved for the year in this quarter as this is the start of the financial year.

Last year’s trend shows that hiring in top Indian IT companies picks up in the July- September quarter compared to the previous quarter, he told Business Line .

>raja.simhan@thehindu.co.in

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