IT hiring on the rebound

Top IT service exporters have added around 23,000 engineers in the second quarter of this fiscal, an indication of a possible rebound in IT jobs.

TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech have reported healthy workforce additions, which is the highest since the third quarter of 2012 fiscal when around 33,000 engineers were recruited. To put in perspective, in the 2014 fiscal, Infosys added around 3,000 employees and rival Wipro added 241 in the same period.

Data from the Labour Bureau in the Ministry of Labour & Employment show that the IT sector added only 77,000 workers in 2013-14 compared with 120,000 hires the previous year. If this year’s second quarter numbers are anything to go by IT firms could be adding over one lakh new employees in 2014-15 fiscal.

“The last quarter numbers indicates that there is a surge in hiring,” Kunal Sen, senior V-P, TeamLease Services, told

BusinessLine . This improvement in job outlook has to do largely with improvement in US employment jobs data and a relatively stable Europe. Indian IT exporters get more than 70 per cent of their revenues from the US.

“There is an anticipation that the order book would look more healthy in the coming years on the back of these developments,” said AK Prabhakar, an independent IT analyst. The deal pipeline looks healthy this time around when compared to the same period last year, said KK Natarajan, CEO of Mindtree, in the recent quarterly results call. While this is good news for IT engineers, industry watchers believe that the days of large hiring will not necessarily be the way forward.

Two hiring trends

“There are two trends that are playing out. First, companies are not looking at adding engineers purely based on the projects they get,” said Sen. He added that in the future, the focus will be on just-in-time hiring. “With volatility in business, Indian IT companies are starting to increasingly look at this model but having said that some amount of old style hiring from campus or from competitors will continue,” said Prithvi Shergill, chief human resources officer, HCL Technologies.

Also, the new kinds of engineering jobs are different from the past. In the past, companies could hire masses of Java programmers and with a little training they could be put on projects. “In the new scenario, while these skills are needed, there is an emphasis on engineers understanding technologies like 'Big Data', IoT and mobility,” he said.