TCS, Infosys on hiring spree, offer 70-120% hikes to professionals
Companies are not just focused on hiring new talent but also retaining the older one with substantial salary hikes.
COVID-19 brought with it calamity on both the health and economic front. Companies had to cut down their workforce substantially during the pandemic. But things are changing for the better as companies, especially information and technology firms, are on a hiring spree.
The demand for digital talent in the country is rising with India’s biggest informational technology (IT) service providers Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies announcing they would be hiring around 1 lakh freshers combined in this fiscal year. The companies made the announcement in their respective quarterly earnings reports.
Infosys plans to hire 35,000 freshers, Wipro over 12,000, HCL Tech 20,000-22,000 and TCS will hire 40,000 people from campuses amid demand accentuated by high attrition rates in the industry.
It is a golden time for employees with the right skills who are looking for a new job and want to get a good salary. The development offers good news for cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, where the IT ecosystem is concentrated because it means a booming real estate market and good discretionary consumption overall.
In recent times there has been a great surge of talent in the IT industry which has somewhat disrupted the demand-supply balance. This has led many organisations to focus on both attracting talent as well as retention.
It should also be noted that IT sector jobs have been at an all-time high with the hiring of skilled professionals increasing to 52 per cent from the pre-Covid levels. It was also reported that there has been a 163 per cent year-on-year growth in the hiring for June 2021, as per the data from the Quess report.
Hiring data for the period between March to August 2021 detailed in the report suggests that the demand for talent with digital skills such as Full-stack, React JS, Android, Angular JS, Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, Cyber Security etc., has seen a surge since October-March 2020-2021.
COVID push
Another reason behind the super aggressive hiring drives by IT companies is the slowdown in recruitment during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the initial phases of the pandemic, hiring was hit by about 50 per cent.
According to Indeed Report, which effectively analysed the impact of the pandemic on India’s job market, the demand for IT professionals has risen by as much as 400 per cent. Even a simple job search on LinkedIn will give you an idea about the recovery reported in the various sectors in terms of the job vacancies.
Given the switch many companies, professionals and institutions have made to digitalisation in the wake of the pandemic, the demand for IT professionals has jumped by about 400 per cent, according to a report by job search portal Indeed India.
“The continued reliance of tech solutions across organisations and extension of work-from-home structure, businesses ramping up their technological infrastructures to scale up businesses and ensure smooth operations resulted in a soaring number of postings for tech jobs,” it noted.
The report analysing COVID-19’s impact on the country’s job market suggested that the “demand for skilled technical professionals including Application Developer, Lead Consultant, Salesforce Developer and Site Reliability Engineer grew 150-300 per cent between January 2020 and February 2021.”
Retaining talent
A new report points out that firms are now offering even a 120 per cent hike to attract professionals, especially software engineers in the face of rising demand.
Companies are also now open to offer impressive hikes on current salaries to hire more talented professionals. IT companies are offering 70-120 per cent hike to full-stack engineers. Earlier, employers used to get a salary hike in the range of about 10-30 per cent only.
TCS recently announced a recruitment drive for women professionals looking to restart their careers. The TCS ‘Rebegin’ project is aimed at hiring experienced and aspiring women who wish to jump-start their professional journey.
Rebegin is a TCS Careers initiative intended to benefit women professionals who have taken a career sabbatical due to family or other pressing commitments to help them reassimilate into the corporate culture.
