TCS looks to hire 40,000 freshers this fiscal year

Mumbai: Largest software exporter TCS will be hiring more than 40,000 freshers from campuses in the country in the financial year 2021-22, a top executive said on Friday.

The company, the largest employer in the private sector with a base of over 5 lakh employees, had hired 40,000 graduates from campuses last year and will do better on that number, its chief of global human resources Milind Lakkad told reporters here.

He said the Covid pandemic-related restrictions do not pose any difficulties in hiring and added that last year, a total of 3.60 lakh freshers had appeared for an entrance test virtually.

"From the campus in India, we hired 40,000 last year. We will continue to hire and hire 40,000 or more this year in India," Lakkad told reporters, adding that lateral hiring will also be robust this year. Similarly, the company will also do better on the 2,000 trainees hired from American campuses last year, he said, without sharing an exact number. Lakkad said a lot of planning goes into hiring from campuses and it is not 'just-in-time' hiring when a business deal gets signed up, and typically it takes over three months before a resource gets on a project.

The company's chief operating officer N Ganapathy Subramaniam said there is no dearth of talent supply in India and also disagreed with concerns about its cost. He termed Indian talent as 'phenomenal' given their skill sets and the work culture. Its Chief Executive and Managing Director Rajesh Gopinathan said it often gets asked if the organisation is too large but added that the way it is structured makes it possible from a management and nimble-footedness perspective.

TCS has broken the organisation into small, autonomous entities with support from the top which helps take care of challenges, he said, pointing out that several entities like the railways, armed forces and political parties function with large pools of people. Lakkad said the company expects the very low attrition of 8 per cent levels to go up once the situation normalises, adding that the normal levels are between 11-12 per cent. Even if the attrition goes up, the company's operating model can ensure that the work or margins are not impacted, he added. Its newly appointed Chief Financial Officer Samir Seksaria said even though the company expects discretionary spending to normalise by the end of the fiscal, they are a small subset of its overall expenditure. There are other levers to compress costs as well, he said, stressing that structurally there are no deterrents to the aspired operating profit margin band of 26-28 per cent, which was missed in the first quarter.

Speaking a day after the company announced its June quarter results, which showed a setback on its India business, Gopinathan said the 14 per cent dip in revenues sequentially does not represent any cyclicality in business and was purely out of its businesses like online exams and passport making coming to a "standstill" because of the lockdowns. He said the company had faced similar troubles during the first lockdown as well in the first quarter of the financial year 2020-21 and added that though the announcements were about local lockdowns, they impacted activity across.

Subramaniam hinted that the lost revenues – which were pegged at Rs 350 crore by Gopinathan on Thursday – will be made up in the second and third quarter of the financial year, explaining that these revenues are from tests and exams conducted by its unit Ion.