Stung By 18% Attrition, Cognizant Will Now Hire 28,000 Indian Freshers From Colleges

The information technology industry in the country is witnessing a revolutionary shift, in terms of demand for new-age digital skills.

In addition to increasing attrition rates in some of the most coveted IT giants locally and globally, job-seekers today are simultaneously negotiating with three to four companies at an average, for better salary offers.

Furthermore, such employees are also being presented with over 50-70% joining hikes, given the increasing demand for niche digital skills and not enough supply, catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Consequently, hiring is on a swift uprise in the given sector. Top Indian IT giants like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL Tech will hire over 1 lakh freshers cumulatively in 2021-22.

Now, the New Jersey-based IT giant, Cognizant has announced that it will be hiring no less than 28,000 freshers in the country, for the current calendar year.

This comes after the IT giant reported a revenue hike of about 2.4% in constant currency terms in the first quarter of 2021, in addition to the attrition rate of 18% for the Jan-Mar quarter.

Please note that Cognizant follows a January-December financial year.

Cognizant to Hire Over 28k Freshers in CY21

Trak.in has covered a detailed report of Cognizant’s first quarter results. In a nutshell, the company has predicted its revenue growth for the current year as 7-9%, in constant currency terms, while expecting growth of 10.5-11.5% in the second quarter ending June.

The company’s voluntary attrition rose dramatically from 10% in Q3CY2020 to 18% in Q1CY21.

In response, Cognizant has announced to add over 28,000 freshers from campus hirings in 2021, up from about 17,000 hires in 2019. 

Cognizant India’s chairman and managing director, Rajesh Nambiar states that the company’s brand perception has grown significantly, especially in the primary market. 

“Our campus acceptance rate amongst all India’s top engineering colleges has risen more. And now it’s roughly about 81%. It’s up 10 percentage points since 2019”, added Nambiar.

18% Employees Voluntarily Quit Cognizant in Only 3 Months

Rajesh Nambiar stressed that the main problem faced by Cognizant today, is not attracting the right talent but losing them.

The pandemic has sped up the process of increasing demands for skilled techies excelling at niche digital skills, to an extent that companies are willing to pay heavily for these positions.

Yeshab Giri, Director of Randstad India says, “Covid has opened up IT in a big way. Now, everyone is willing to pay big bucks for good IT talent because the demand is huge and supply is less. For every 10 job offers made, 4-5 of them are turning down the offer. This is quite high and difficult for both us and the companies we recruit for to manage hiring.”

Cognizant witnessed a total attrition rate of 21% in the jan-Mar quarter, of which 18% attrition was voluntary.

Nambiar also addressed that the major reason behind this high attrition is the increase in competition for procuring the best digital talent, across the market.

He added that the company is working towards setting up internal initiatives, by investing in-vitro, on employees via training, job rotation, as well as targeted salary hikes and promotions.

“We’re also shifting to a quarterly promotion cycle to all the billable associates and ramping up our hiring capacity by adding hundreds of recruiters”.

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