Top three Indian information technology companies together added 12,187 employees in the June quarter. This is a nearly 68 per cent net increase over the same quarter last year.
The increased employee hiring was in the backdrop of high attrition witnessed by the three companies. Some employees left one company to join another but a large chunk left in the first quarter to pursue higher studies, said sources.
Tata Consultancy Services had higher net employee addition than Wipro and Infosys.
However, the biggest change in the net hiring was witnessed by Infosys that hired 3,336 employees in the June quarter compared with 879 in the corresponding quarter last year.
N Chandrasekaran, CEO, TCS, told analysts the company had said that it would hire 60,000 (gross) at the beginning of the quarter and in June quarter it has already had over 20,000 gross employee additions. “We will calibrate it as we go. Demand is good. So we will see,” he said.
For TCS, attrition in the IT services stood at 15 per cent on last twelve-month basis while the overall figure, including BPO, was 15.9 per cent.
The job market is pretty buoyant, but out of that, it is business process services (BPS) and Latin America where the attrition level was high, said Ajoy Mukherjee, Head, Global Human Resources, TCS.
Sources in the recruitment industry said that higher attrition means there is a lot of lateral movement among senior level officials between companies.
Vishal Sikka, CEO, Infosys, said that attrition remains in check. On an annualised basis, attrition during the June quarter dropped to 14.2 per cent from 23.4 per cent in the first quarter of last year. This is more than nine per cent improvement. There was a slight up tick in absolute terms during the June quarter, although this is seasonal for this time of the year.
Wage hike During the quarter, Infosys offered a wage increase of 7.5-8 per cent for its offshore employees and 2.5 per cent for onsite, he told analysts.
For Wipro, the voluntary attrition in IT services (excluding BPO and I&ME) was 16.4 per cent on a trailing twelve-month basis.