India’s top IT firms are on a spree of hiring new talents this year as they gear to bring in more staff to meet the growing IT sector demands. According to fresh reports, TCS, Infosys, HCL, and Wipro, all major IT firms plan to hire more than 1 lakh freshers this fiscal year.
However, according to Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno, there is a difference between the intent to hire that many candidates and having the ability to hire them. As we know, IT firm Cognizant has plans to hire 30,000 freshers and 1,00,000 laterals this year, meaning that it will be onboarding nearly 300 experienced professionals every day.
To undertake such an onboarding task, an IT firm would need to make offers to 700 people a day, as IT services enterprises have a dropout ratio of more than 40%, added Karanth. Even though the IT firms in the country have an extremely robust hiring process and large talent acquisition teams, but Karnath believes that this is a challenging year to hire laterals. “If the mix is 75:25 between freshers and laterals, then it’s feasible,” he added.
According to recent data compiled by Xpheno, offer acceptance rates have fallen dramatically, especially for skills with severe shortages. For roles such as full-stack engineer, data engineer, data scientist, and DevOps engineers in the many IT firms of the country has dropped to about 45%, from over 80%. this shows the lack of skills presented by both the freshers and laterals.
Saravanan Balasundaram, CEO of talent consultancy firm Han Digital states that onboarding as a proportion of total offers has dropped to less than 50% for IT services firms because employees are sitting on multiple offers.
Firms are taking approvals to make higher salary offers quickly so that candidates get less time to shop for other offers, resulting in an increase of about 100% in salaries for roles like cloud, cloud-native, mean stack developers.
