TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Increase Lateral Hiring Of Outsiders Even As Fewer Employees Are Leaving!

The Covid 19 pandemic has given rise to a steep fall in new hiring and job vacancies.

Every industry sector, including the IT industry has seen a downfall in new hiring, due to the pandemic situation.

The total active job openings dropped from 2 lakh in April to 1.67 lakh in May, while the closing figure for June was registered to be 1.32 lakh.

Let’s focus now on the IT industry sector.

It has been reported that despite the bad hiring scenarios in the market, the Indian tech industry is continuing its lateral hirings.

Lateral Hiring on a Rise

Although there isn’t any complete freeze on hiring in different companies and most appointment letters are being honored, companies have nonetheless turned judicious when it comes to hiring.

However, it has been seen that the major tech companies in India haven’t gone as slow as the market standards, when it comes to hiring.

Though let’s be very clear about the kind of hiring we are talking about here: Lateral hiring.

Despite the slowdown in hiring scenes, all the major tech companies have continued to bring on lateral hires.

Major Reason Behind Rise in Lateral Hiring

One of the main reasons behind this is the attrition rate.

You give you a little insight, an attrition rate is a metric used to measure employees or customers lost over a period of time who are not replaced.

Human resources employees often use an attrition rate to determine the number of vacant or eliminated positions.

These rates denote the speed at which employees leave the organisation. If the attrition rate is lower, this means less employees are leaving the company.

• Number of lateral hires at Infosys is about 5000, while
• Number of lateral hires at HCL Tech is about 2000.

Lateral Hires & Fresher On-Boarding are Different

We would like to highlight the fact that offering any new freshers to come on board is not the same as lateral hirings.

While any fresher asked to join the respective tech company before the pandemic is still welcome, any new fresher joining is not part of the plan.

The companies are instead, looking towards lateral hiring to fill the vacant positions for skilled workers, who would work on current deals and projects.

What Do Top Indian IT Cos have to Comment on the Matter?

Wipro’s chief human resources officer (CHRO) Saurabh Govil claims that the company never actually stopped lateral hiring.

HCL Tech’s CHRO Apparao VV says, “The downward trend in attrition continues. Expected to continue in the next quarter as well. Attrition has significantly come down but we will not be hiring significant numbers for immediate replacement.”

TCS, on the other hand, despite not hiring in the 1^st quarter of FY21, filled in over 4,500 positions by reskilling, cross-skilling and multiskilling the existing employees.