The US-based information technology (IT) consulting company Cognizant, one of the world’s leading professional services companies has announced its first-quarter 2021 financial results on July 28, 2021.
Cognizant’s attrition for the first quarter escalated to a record high of 31%, of which 29% was voluntary attrition. The company has a total headcount of 301,200.
A rough calculation shows that over 23,300 employees left the company during the quarter, which means an average of 350-380 employees resigned every working day between April-June 2021.
A majority of Cognizant’s employees are based in India and Humphries said the attrition was primarily in the more junior levels of the organisation or mid-levels in India.
Cognizant has been undergoing major restructuring under CEO Brian Humphries, who joined in 2019. This restructuring includes doing away with some of the businesses.
Currently, the US-based IT major has the highest attrition among its peers in India. For the quarter ended June, TCS reported attrition at 8.6%, Infosys at 13.9%, Wipro at 15.5%, and HCL Technology at 11.8%.
Accenture had reported 17% attrition in the March to May quarter this year
CEO Brian Humphries said, “The company will hire 1 Lakh experienced professionals in 2021 and upskill close to 1 Lakh associates to deal with attrition challenge”
“Cognizant expects to welcome around 30,000 new graduates this year and is planning to make 45,000 offers to freshers in India for 2022,” he added.
Rajesh Nambiar, President-Digital Business & Technology and Chairman, India at Cognizant, agreed attrition is higher than it should be.
“We have doubled down on our hiring, we anticipated this whole imbalance and exits in the industry. In addition to investing in our own people, we will also be making record hires to ensure that we will have a very robust talent pipeline. So we are going to be hiring 100,000 lateral hires this year,” Rajesh Nambiar said
“And then we will train roughly about 95,000-100,000 people in new digital capabilities. The third bucket is our graduate hires, 30,000 new graduate hires (have been) onboarded already for financial year 2021. We have also given offers to 45,000 new graduate hires this year so they will be onboarded next year, in 2022,” he told
