After a year of lull IT service companies, it appears, are back on a recruitment spree. This is evident from the campus recruitment at Tamil Nadu’s top engineering college campuses this year. Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Infosys have all made large number of Day 1 offers.

At SRM Institute of Science and Technology, over 3,000 day-one offers (gross numbers include one student getting multiple offers) were made with Infosys alone making 1,185 offers followed by TCS with 985, Cognizant with 648 and Wipro with 202. Comparatively, last year 1,086 offers were made by both TCS and Infosys. Cognizant did not turn up for campus recruitment.

“This year will be much better than last year,” Sriram S Padmanabhan, Director, Career Centre, SRM, told BusinessLine .

Similarly, at Vellore Institute of Technology, V Samuel Rajkumar, Director (Placement and Training), said a total of 2,047 offers were made with 852 by Cognizant followed by Infosys with 630 and TCS with 592. Last year, it was only 1,300 with Cognizant not turning up.. “Top recruiters are saying hiring will be good for next three years. This clarity was missing last year,” he said.

Similar views were echoed by GK Rajhesh, Placement Officer at Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai and V Badrinath, Director, Training and Placement, Sastra University.

Day-one hiring is an important indicator of recruitment pattern in IT industry as it accounts for 50-60 per cent of job offers with the rest made during next six months of the academic year. In India, the maximum number of mass recruitment happens in Tamil Nadu, which has over 500 engineering colleges. While day one hiring numbers are far higher than last year, they will still be 20-30 per cent lower compared to peak in 2015-16, say college placement officers.

Last fiscal, IT companies improved employee utilisation and reduced bench strength resulting in lower intake from colleges. However, this year with large project wins coupled with average employee utilisation on site is at a peak of around 90 per cent and offshore, excluding trainees, 80 per cent. Companies need to hire people to meet the demand and improve bench strength.

Ajoy Mukherjee, Head of Global Human Resources, TCS, told analysts recently, that the company has been hiring and going forward its recruitment will be higher than what it has been doing. "Net addition in first quarter was about 5,800, which was much higher than what it was at the same time last year. So, this is all going towards the kind of demand outlook that we have."

While business demand is year round, in India, most students pass out of campuses at the same time - during June and July. In June 2018 quarter Cognizant had a net headcount addition of about 7,500 professionals, and ‘we expect to continue to hire through the rest of the year to continue to meet demand, said its Global Head Talent Acquisition, Suresh Bethavandu.

But there are sceptics. This year campus recruitment is definitely better but it is too early to take this number as a big boom or recruitment spree, said Jayaprakash Gandhi, an education expert.