While the Indian IT firms are going through tough times with respect to hiring, India’s leading IT firm has handed out 24,000 new job offers. This news is quite reassuring considering several projections that hiring in the IT industry is expected to witness a decline in the coming years.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which recently crossed the $100 billion market cap is in aggressive hiring mode. The IT firm has offered 20,000 job offers to fresh graduates and another 4,000 offers to non-freshers this year. The company expects 70% of these offers to join the company.
The off-campus recruitment round was conducted by Ajoyendra Mukherjee, the executive vice-president and head of global HR at TCS. The off-campus drive was carried out during January and February. The number is quite low as compared to the job offers that the company handed out a few years ago. TCS had issued over 40,000 job offers in 2015 and 35,000 in 2016.
Mukherjee said, “On account of automation, hiring in the IT sector will go down to a certain extent but it will not freeze. In fact, automation will also create opportunities.” Mukherjee further highlighted the massive reskilling drive of its existing workforce. The company plans to interchange the job roles as per the requirements.
TCS has already trained 2.1 lakh employees out of 3.95 lakh under the Agile program. The reskilling drive would not impact the company’s margins. The operating margins of TCS have been declining for the last five years. Mukherjee added, “We have made sufficient investments towards reskilling programmes over the last few years and it is better than opting for outside hiring.”
The declining value of the Indian currency has much to do with the impacted operating revenue. In 2014, the operating margins of TCS stood at 29.1%, which further declined to 36.5% in 2015-16 and 24.8% in 2017-18. The company also faced a number of challenges in the US.
Mukherjee added, “The problem in the US is that students are not opting for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects. We are coming up with initiatives to encourage them to take up core technical disciples.”