HCLTech reported a net addition of 17,067 for the fiscal year 2023, a steep decline of around 57.3 percent from the 39,900 employees added in FY22.
This comes at a time when tech companies have started reducing hiring to focus on improving employee utilisation rates.
Fresher hiring target missed
HCLTech’s full-year fresher hiring target of 30,000 as discussed by its CEO and MD, C Vijayakumar, during its Q1FY23 earnings call was missed.
Total fresher addition for FY23 came in at 26,734.
The total headcount of the company at present stands at 225,944.
Hiring target
In FY24, the company targets to add 15,000 freshers that will be higher than the gross addition.
This is higher than the previous quarter’s net addition of over 2,945 employees in Q3, but significantly lower than the 11,100 employees hired in the same quarter last fiscal.
Ramachandran Sundararajan, chief people officer at HCLTech said, “The good thing is we honoured all the offers that we made, without any onboarding delays. That’s baked into our quarterly roll out plans.”
Attrition
“Attrition has been a phenomenal story.
In summary, the success we have had in FY23 is clearly attributable to our people strengths not only in our numbers but also in terms of skills and investments we have made through the year in our upskilling programmes,” he added.
The Q4 attrition rate for the quarter stood at 19.5 percent on last twelve months (LTM) basis, decreasing significantly from 21.7 percent in the previous quarter and 21.9 percent in the same quarter last year.
Profit, revenue
On April 20 the company reported its Q4FY23 numbers.
Consolidated net profit for the quarter ended March 2023 stood at Rs 3,981 crore, up 10.61 percent against Rs 3,599 crore a year back.
Revenue from operations for the period stood at Rs 26,606 crore, clocking a growth of 17.74 percent from Rs 22,597 crore.
The profit figure beat estimates but revenue lagged the projections.
Variable pay
Around 85 percent of the company’s employees are a part of the variable pay programme, which accounts for only 5 percent of their pay package, without any change in policy.
HCLTech also heavily outsourced employees from its new frontier locations such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Romania, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil.
How rivals fared
Rivals TCS and Infosys have also begun slowing down hiring, shifting focus to utilisation.
TCS added only 821 employees in Q4, Infosys slashed net headcount by 3,611.TCS added only 821 employees in Q4, Infosys slashed net headcount by 3,611.
