For the third year in a row, Cognizant has hired over 200 students from various IITs, in the 2016 batch. Among all the four major IT service companies, Cognizant has been the top recruiter over the last three years.

Usually, students from IIT are keen to join product companies than IT service companies. Given this trend, Cognizant attracting over 200 students from the IITs is a ‘major achievement’, said an industry source.

Over 600 students from IITs may have joined the Indian IT industry, of which Cognizant could be one of the top recruiters, said Jayaprakash Gandhi, a career consultant and analyst.

According to Sriram Rajagopal, Senior Vice-President (Human Resources), Cognizant, the company is one of the ‘most aggressive’ hirers from IITs.

For the 2016 batch, the company hired from all key IITs, including Bombay, Kanpur, Madras, Roorkee, Delhi, Kharagpur, BHU and others, across disciplines.

IIT recruits have contributed a great deal towards enhancing the company’s digital capabilities to help clients make the fundamental, technology-enabled changes across all aspects of the organisation – business, operations and systems – to compete and win in today’s new technology- and data-intensive world. Be it the Global Technology Office that identifies emerging technologies to create real business value, or Cognizant Digital Business that helps clients reshape their products, business models, and customer and employee experiences – talent from institutions such as the IITs is key to our ability to develop innovative products and services for long-term growth opportunities, he further said.

Talent from premier technology schools has helped spearhead the company’s entry into SMAC (social, media, analytics and cloud) and Internet of Things.

For example, they are working to realise the potential of developing technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, and to incubate new IP-based offerings, he said.

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