On hiring drive, TCS picks 10,000 freshers from country's top engineering colleges

At a time when the country’s top engineering colleges and IITs are registering a decline in placements, IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has hired a significant number of freshers in its latest recruitment drive.

This comes as a huge respite for colleges as well as students who have witnessed hiring drop from most of the big IT firms, owing to weak demand in the sector.

The Mumbai-headquartered firm is hiring for three categories – Ninja, Digital, and Prime, as per a report by Moneycontrol. The Ninja category offers a package of Rs 3.36 lakh per annum for various roles, while the Digital and Prime categories offer an annual package of Rs 7 lakh and Rs 9-11.5 lakh, respectively.

Colleges hail move

Colleges have hinted that students receiving Digital and Prime profiles will be placed for a development role, while students in Ninja profiles will be placed in support roles, said the report.

“In my view it is a very, very welcome move given the current situation, so definitely good students from all the colleges will get a placement with TCS,” V Samuel Rajkumar, director of Career Development Centre, Vellore Institute of Technology, told Moneycontrol. “I think they will be reasonably good numbers, that's what we are expecting.”

Rajkumar said VIT students have received a total of 963 offer letters, out of which 103 were for the prime category.

S Vaidhyasubramaniam, vice-chancellor of SASTRA University, said 1,300 students of their university have been handed over 2,000 offer letters, which implies that many of them received more than one offer on average. However, a separate breakup for students recruited by TCS was not available.

“TCS has come in a big way on recruiting. And that's the big news of the season,” said Venkata Narasimhadevara, director of the Career Centre at SRM Institute of Science and Technology.

Attracting better talent

According to colleges, TCS' approach of a three-tiered package signals a departure from traditional entry-level position offerings, to attract better talent.

Earlier, TCS had said it planned to add 40,000 freshers in FY24. The company added 22,600 employees during FY23, a steep decline as compared to its net addition of 1.03 lakh employees in FY22. This was the company’s lowest net headcount addition since FY15 when it had added 19,000 employees on a net basis during the year.

The TCS had last month announced that it has begun fresher hiring via the National Qualifier Test (NQT), which is an assessment platform designed by TCS iON to measure the candidates’ cognitive ability and skill expertise.

The last day to apply was April 10 for the recruitment drive. TCS had announced that tests will be held on April 26. While the first phase of recruitment is for the “priority colleges”, the second phase will be held on April 26 for the rest. Placement officers said NQT and campus placements are one and the same.