Top three IT firms’ hiring up 44% at 72,000 in FY21

Top Indian IT services companies added 72,000 employees, up 44 per cent from about 50,000 in the previous year, to their workforces in the pandemic-hit fiscal year 2021 as the software giants booked record deal numbers. The hiring trend is expected to continue this fiscal.

IT consulting and research firm Everest Group’s CEO Peter Bendor-Samuel said the IT industry is seeing a remarkable growth surge, which is also combined with a renewed interest in moving work offshore to destinations like India. “While the secular trend to move to new digital technologies continues, it is now being augmented by firms moving more legacy or traditional work offshore. The net result of this is an emerging talent shortage both onshore and offshore with a resulting inflation in wages as well as increased recruiting for both experienced and new talent,” he said.

TCS’s workforce expanded by 40,005 people to touch 4,88,469, Infosys’s went up by 17,248 and Wipro’s by 14,826. In comparison, in FY10, the year after the global financial crisis, these three companies cumulatively hired about 36,000 people.

The pandemic has underscored the criticality of IT systems to serve workers and customers remotely. Many clients are upgrading their systems and also trying to cut costs with technology.

“We see a continued strong demand in digital deals in areas of cloud, data & analytics, and cyber security,” Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said last week. All the three companies have seen such deals now forming a big chunk of their pipeline. Many customers, especially in the retail business, are already involved in multi-year digital transformation deals to compete against online players like Amazon.

The employee additions are the highest in three years and happened even when it was expected to hit a roadblock at the start of the year when firms put a freeze on fresh hiring and in many cases, delayed onboarding to whom offers had been made. Most onboardings — almost all of them virtual — happened in the second half of the fiscal when the companies had a clearer picture of the deal flows. In previous years, such onboarding happened in the first two quarters as academic courses ended.

While a few years ago, companies were talking about a slowdown in hiring from campuses, things have reversed now as a healthy deal pipeline has raised the need for people to work on numerous digital projects. Infosys, TCS and Wipro are expected to hire as robustly this fiscal as they did in the last.

“Talent search is now being dictated by talent around digital skills — CX/UX, IoT, data science, AI/ML, cybersecurity, etc. It’s easier to bring in freshers and train them as they are ‘blank slates’ so to speak. Retraining requires established skills and habits to be devolved which is harder to achieve,” said Hansa Iyengar, analyst at UK-based IT advisory Omdia.