The IT sector has been seeing a trend of mass layoffs and slowing net additions in each quarter.
Here’s a look at how India’s biggest IT companies have fared in terms of hiring and attrition.
Downward curve
India’s top three IT companies — Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and HCLTech — saw a steep drop in their net addition for the 2023 fiscal year — down cumulatively from 1.97 lakh to 68,886 — a 65 percent drop.
They also reported a dismal quarter and were not optimistic about the near term due to the banking crisis in US regional banks and European banks, as well as the macroeconomic climate at large.
Cumulative hiring numbers
Hiring is seen as an indicator of demand, and the stress was visible in Q4FY23
There was a 98.7 percent drop in the number of employees the three companies added on a net basis in Q4FY23 compared to the same period last year.
TCS, HCLTech, and Infosys added just 884 employees on a net basis in Q4FY23, compared to 68,257 in Q4FY22
Sequentially, the net addition of the three companies has fallen from 2,375 in Q3FY23.
TCS
TCS added 1,03,546 employees in FY22 on a net basis, which fell to 22,600 in FY23.
In Q4FY23, TCS added 821 employees which is a significant drop from the 35,209 they added in Q4FY22.
Attrition reached 21.5 percent on a last-twelve-month (LTM) basis in Q2FY23, and has moderated to 20.1 percent in Q4.
It expects attrition to return to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of the fiscal.
They onboarded over 44,000 freshers, as well as their “highest ever number of experienced professionals during the year”, said Milind Lakkad, Chief People Officer.
For the coming year, the company is looking to add 46,000 campus hires in FY24.
The number of lateral hires “will be dependent on the demand from the business every quarter.”
CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said, “We had brought down our lateral hiring and our overall capacity addition, leveraging the strong investments that we had made in the last year
We are systematically using the return to normalcy on travel to reposition our employee base in North America, away from the short-term contingent labour back to our more stable employee-led delivery model,” Gopinathan said.
Infosys
Infosys saw its yearly net addition nearly halve to 29,219, from 54,396 last year.
In Q4, it ended the quarter with 3,611 fewer employees than it had at the end of Q3.
In comparison, the company added 21,948 employees on a net basis in the same period last year.
Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy said that the company’s utilisation has declined to 80 percent due to softness in demand.
He said the company expects the utilization to improve gradually in the coming quarters as freshers start getting deployed.
They will “calibrate the hiring for FY24 based on the available pool of employees, growth expectations and attrition trends.”
The company hired roughly 51,000 freshers in FY23, but refused to give any targets going ahead.
The company’s attrition declined to 20.9 percent on an LTM basis in Q4FY23, declining steeply in every quarter of the fiscal year
Quarterly annualized attrition has reduced by over 4 percent sequentially, is the lowest in the nine quarters, and is below pre-pandemic levels.
The headcount addition for FY24 could be tepid due to “limited demand visibility, significant headroom on utilization, moderating lateral attrition and trainees becoming billable”, according to Kotak Institutional Equities.
HCLTech
HCLTech’s net addition for the year came in at 17,067, down from FY22’s 39,900
For Q4 too, it added 3,674 employees, as opposed to Q4FY22’s 11,100.
CEO C Vijayakumar said that it had added 4,480 freshers during the quarter.
It is “lower than the last quarter, adjusting for the market conditions.”
“We’ve added more than 25,000 freshers in the year, the highest in our history.
While we are scaling fresher intake, we still have an opportunity here. We will have sustained focus on this over the next two to three years to improve this further,” he added.
Ramachandran Sundararajan, chief people officer said that attrition has been a “phenomenal story”.
The attrition rate in Q4 stood at 19.5 percent on an LTM basis, decreasing significantly from 21.7 percent in the previous quarter and 21.9 percent in the same quarter last year.
Nirmal Bang Institutional Equities said that HCLTech indicated that lateral hiring would moderate in FY24.
Fresher hiring is expected to continue with a target of hiring 15,000 freshers during the year.
