On January 12, India’s IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced its third-quarter results for the financial year 2022. All three Top IT Companies in India TCS, Infosys, and Wipro have reported a jump in attrition rate which leads to an increase in the number of freshers hiring in Q4.
Attrition
- TCS attrition inched up to 15.3% compared to 11.9% in the second quarter
- Infosys attrition has risen to to 25.5%, from 20.1% in the September quarter
- Wipro attrition climbed to 22.7% on a trailing twelve-month basis, up from 20.5% last quarter
Milind Lakkad, Chief Human Resources Officer at TCS said to reporters during the Q3 earnings call, “We had a net addition of 28,238 in Q3 bringing the total headcount to 556,986. It continues to be a very diverse workforce with 156 nationalities represented and with women making up to 36% of the base. The number of women in the workforce crossed 200,000 this quarter.”
“In the face of industry-wide supply side challenges, we have doubled down on our investment in organic talent development. Over 100,000 market-relevant deep skills were gained by TCS in Q3.” He said
Milind Lakkad further said, “The number of contextual masters, that is individuals who have demonstrated deep contextual knowledge of their customer’s business and IT landscapes has now crossed 38,000. The sustained strength of demand, particularly in new technologies, has necessitated large scale hiring of fresh talent,”
“As you know, we had onboarded 43,000 freshers in the first half of the year, all trained on the latest technologies. And in our last call, we had indicated plans of hiring another 34,000 in the second half. I am happy to inform you that we achieved the figure in Q3 itself and are now planning to hire some more in Q4.” he added.
Commenting on the hiring Milind said, “Fresher hiring continues to be through our national qualifier test (NQT). However, we have increased its frequency to cater to our unprecedented volumes of hiring. Let me now spend a minute on the elevated employee churn we have seen across the industry for the last few months,”
“Our progressive people policies, empowering culture, investments in our people, fast-track careers linked to learning and, I think, a very differentiated, ample set of opportunities for global deployment, continue to be huge differentiators for us, that have enabled industry-leading talent retention at TCS,” he said.
Addressing the attrition, Milind said, “In addition, we have been tactically responding to the increasing attrition by benchmarking our compensation levels with the market and promoting over 110,000 employees this year so far and plan another 40,000 before March 2022″
“All this has helped us contain the number of departures and retain the best of our talent. On an LTM basis, our attrition and IT services was at 15.3% in Q3. The arithmetic of LTM calculations means that this metric might rise further in Q4, but we believe that the churn is stabilizing for now. Nevertheless, we will continue to closely monitor this metric.” He added.
Commenting on Return to Office plan he said, “In our last call, I had mentioned that we were preparing for a return to office for most of our employees by the start of this new year. As you all know, because of the current pandemic situation, we have temporarily put that plan on hold, and we will recalibrate our timelines. We will be closely monitoring the evolving situation on the ground across our different locations before announcing our new return to work plans.”
Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer, TCS said, “Important milestone is that the number of women in our workforce crossed 200,000. Beyond that headline number, it is also an occasion to celebrate the progress we are making in creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace,”
“As an outcome of various leadership development initiatives focused on women employees, the number of senior women executives in the organization has grown by 68% between 2016 and 2021”