HCL Increases Freshers’ Salary By 21%! Rs 4.25 Lakh Salary For HCL Freshers, Up From Rs 3.5 Lakh

HCL Technologies Chief HR officer VV Apparao said that the firm has raised freshers’ salary from ?3.5 lakh to ?4.25 lakh per year.

Company Strategy

The company increases the pay grades wherever skills are at a premium. 

It has intensified its focus on retention and fresher growth.

It also set up comprehensive increment plans for the entry level during the previous fiscal.

This is an effort towards attracting talent and tackling acute attrition.

Attrition

HCL, which is India’s third largest software services provider by revenue, will need a few more quarters before the attrition rate reduces from the current 20% levels, Apparao said.

It ended the year at an attrition level of 21.9% compared to 9.9% in the previous year.

It said that it witnessed early signs of attrition slowing down during the FY22 fourth quarter.

However, it does not see a significant dip and expects the 20% attrition rate to last for another fiscal year.

Base Expansion 

At the same time, the company is expanding in smaller cities in India and abroad to widen its talent base.

It reported an operating margin of 18% for the quarter ended March 31 and 18.9% for the full fiscal year.

These are at the lower end of estimates because of higher employee costs and a seasonal slump in its products and platforms (P&P) business.

Training Students 

The freshers compensation hike came in addition to an existing programme that allows freshers to get additional certifications.

These would help increase their compensation to ?6 lakh a year.

It has already tied up with engineering colleges for courses in analytics and digital content and students who take and clear the cases will join HCL at ?6 lakh salary.

Fresher Hiring

Its fresher intake is about 11% of its 208,877 employee base and expects around 34,000 fresher recruits in FY23.

It has already exceeded its guidance for fresher hires in FY22 (20,000-22,000) to onboard 23,000 recruits for the year.

Wage Hikes

The company will roll out wage hikes in July.

It will be similar to the 7-8% band offered in FY22.

Apparao said that they already rolled out increments, defined fresher compensation grids and corrected the same for previous five batches.

It also rolled out a “couple of retention kitties” which are significant in amount. 

Hence there is no need to do anything more than the increment it gave the previous year since it was not a standalone increment.