Business Standard Software majors on hiring spree in Sept qu...
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Software majors on hiring spree in Sept quarter

ADITH CHARLIE

Add over 23,000 staff against 12,254 in 2013; drive triggered by adoption of new tech and higher demand for IT services globally

MUMBAI, OCTOBER 23:  

The last three months have seen a hiring overdrive in the IT services segment, with the big daddies collectively creating almost twice the number of new jobs in the September quarter in comparison with the same period last year.

Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies brought on board 23,129 new staffers in the three months ended September 30, 2014, as against 12,254 in the corresponding year-ago quarter. In the April-June quarter, the companies had made a net addition of 8,746 new personnel.

Increasing demand

The increased hiring was triggered by the adoption of new technologies coupled with higher demand for cost-effective IT services across geographies. “New technologies (such as cloud, mobility, analytics and others) have become mainstream while the demand for bread and butter services (read application development, maintenance and so on) has also peaked because of the improvements in the global economy. Business complexity has increased and IT companies need to hire aggressively to strengthen their offerings,” said Sunil Goel, Director of executive search firm GlobalHunt.

Strong demand pipeline

Despite the last quarter being a mixed bag for the top four IT firms, the secular rise in hiring numbers points towards a strong demand pipeline for the sector.

While the US and Europe have been showing steady growth, key developing markets such as India and Africa have also shown signs of making a comeback in the September quarter.

Though the rise in collective hiring numbers for the top IT firms appears to be more pronounced last quarter at 23,129 compared with 8,746 in the April –June quarter, industry watchers are not reading too much into it.

“The June quarter is a period of controlled hiring for Indian IT majors as the human resources teams get the recruitment mandate and budgets approved for the year. The September quarter is when hiring gathers momentum,” said Goel of GlobalHunt.

Maximum addition

The country’s largest software exporter, TCS, reported the highest net addition of 8,326, taking its overall headcount to 313,757 in Q2. “…the hiring this year has been pretty strong; we started the year by saying that we will hire 55,000 people this year, but so far we have already recruited 36,000. We are all set to cross the 55,000 target,” N Chandrasekaran, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of TCS, told analysts in a conference call recently.

The bulk of the increase in net addition year-on-year has been reported by Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech (see table).

Wipro’s net addition was higher than its rivals Infosys and HCL Tech in the September quarter.

While Wipro added 6,845 employees at the net level, Infosys and HCL hired 4,127 and 3,831 employees, respectively.