India's IT giants Infosys, HCL, and TCS record 65% fall in hiring

The lastfiscal (2022-23) was challenging for India's top three techcompanies: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and HCLTech.

All three companies witnessed a steep drop in hiring, as their cumulative employee additions dropped 65 percent from 197,000in 2021-22to just 68,886 in 2022-23, Moneycontrol reported on Tuesday.

There was astaggering 98.7 percentdrop in hiringin the fourth quarter of 2022-23, compared to the same three-month period in 2021-22, the report said.

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TCS, HCLTech, and Infosys added only 884 employeeson a net basis in the quarter that ended in March 2023, in contrast to 68,257 in the same period last year, the report added.

Company-wise hiring decline breakdown

Milind Lakkad, the Chief Human Resources Officer of TCS, acknowledged that the net additionof 821 employees in Q4 and 22,600 for the full year do not fully reflect the extent to which the company ramped up talent acquisition efforts during the year to cope with unprecedented employee churn in the first half of the year.

TCS faced high attrition rates, reaching 21.5 percenton a last-twelve-month (LTM) basis in the second quarter of FY23, beforemoderatingto 20.1 percenttowards the end of March this year. Lakkad, however, told Moneycontrol that he expectedattrition to return to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of the current fiscal.

Infosys, on the other hand, recorded a nearly 50 percent declinein yearly net additions, from 54,396 in the previous year to 29,219 in 2022-23.Infosys ended the last quarter of 2022-23with 3,611 fewer employees than the end of Q3 while adding 21,948 employees on a net basis in the same period in 2022.

Nilanjan Roy, the Chief Financial Officer of Infosys, expressed optimism about a gradual improvement in the situationin the coming quarters as freshers start getting deployed.

HCLTech's net addition of employees in 2022-23saw a 57 percentdrop, declining from 40,252 in the previous year to 17,067. In the last quarter of the preceding fiscal, HCLTech added only 353 employees on a net basis, compared to 11,684 in the same period last year.

The decline in net employee additions for these top IT companies in India couldbe attributed to various factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, increased competition for talent, and uncertainty in the global business environment.

The high attrition rates in the first half of last fiscalalso impacted their hiring plans, leading to a slowdown in net employee additions in the subsequent quarters.