The last fiscal (2022-23) was challenging for India’s top three tech companies: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and HCLTech.
All three companies witnessed a steep drop in hiring, as their cumulative employee additions dropped 65 percent from 197,000 in the previous fiscal year to just 68,886 in 2022-23, Moneycontrol reported on Tuesday.
The drop in hiring was particularly evident in the fourth quarter of 2023, which recorded a staggering 98.7 percent decline compared to the same period in 2022, the report said.
TCS, HCLTech, and Infosys added only 884 employees on a net basis in the quarter that ended in March 2023, in contrast to 68,257 in the same period last year, the report added.
Company-wise hiring decline breakdown
Milind Lakkad, the Chief Human Resources Officer of TCS, acknowledged that the net addition of 821 employees in Q4 and 22,600 for the full year do not fully reflect the extent to which the company ramped up talent acquisition efforts during the year to cope with unprecedented employee churn in the first half of the year. TCS faced high attrition rates, reaching 21.5 percent on a last-twelve-month (LTM) basis in the second quarter of FY23, before moderating to 20.1 percent towards the end of March this year.
Lakkad, however, told Moneycontrol that he expected attrition to return to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of the current fiscal.
Infosys, on the other hand, recorded a nearly 50 percent decline in yearly net additions, from 54,396 in the previous year to 29,219 in 2022-23. Infosys ended the last quarter of 2022-23 with 3,611 fewer employees than the end of Q3 while adding 21,948 employees on a net basis in the same period in 2022.
Nilanjan Roy, the Chief Financial Officer of Infosys, expressed optimism about a gradual improvement in the situation in the coming quarters as freshers start getting deployed.
HCLTech’s net addition of employees in 2022-23 saw a 57 percent drop, declining from 40,252 in the previous year to 17,067. In the last quarter of the preceding fiscal, HCLTech added only 353 employees on a net basis, compared to 11,684 in the same period last year.
The decline in net employee additions for these top IT companies in India can be attributed to various factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, increased competition for talent, and uncertainty in the global business environment. The high attrition rates in the first half of last fiscal also impacted their hiring plans, leading to a slowdown in net employee additions in the subsequent quarters.
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