From Accenture to IBM, IT hiring set to gain pace with 25,000 openings

After a lull in hiring by the IT industry seen during the election period, recruitment seems to have picked up in June, as around 25,000 openings have come up from major software  services companies.

“Accenture has close to 6,600 openings, whereas it stands at close to 2,800 for IBM. Despite the negative news flow, Cognizant has around 5,000 new openings,” said a person familiar with the recruitment process of major IT firms. “Similarly, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has more than thousand openings in the contractual hiring space.” 

Another person in the know said most of these openings are for lateral hiring for people with 4-6 years of experience.  

“The total number of openings, including tier-II firms, is around 25,000. Most of these are lateral job opportunities for people trained in both new age as well as traditional skill sets,” said a senior executive of a recruitment agency. 

During the last financial year, most Indian IT companies had ramped up hiring, anticipating an uptick in demand. 

For instance, the aggregate employee addition by the top three Indian IT services firms in FY19 jumped close to seven times, given these companies went into an overdrive of hiring fresh talent as well as rebadging employees of client organisations. 

TCS, Infosys, and Wipro together added a net 64,805 (after taking into account the attrition) employees in the financial year ended March 2019, when compared to an addition of 9,864 in FY18 and 48,350 in FY17.

However, during the election months of April and May, there had been a substantial drop in hiring. 

“Hiring was subdued during pre-election months as the managements of IT companies were waiting for certainty in policy direction. With the formation of a new government, the uncertainty is behind us, which can be seen as a factor behind the current uptick,” said Supaul Chanda, business head of recruitment firm TeamLease Digital. 

“The ramping up of projects after initial agreements could be another reason for this pickup in hiring.”

Apart from these factors, replacement hiring is another major driver.  “There is 7-10 per cent staff mobilisation every year, after the announcement of annual increments, given that employees leave owing to discontentment over salary hikes,” said Chanda.

Apart from hiring on a company's payroll, which is for permanent positions, even contractual hiring has picked up in recent months. 

“Not only recruitment for permanent staffing, but even contractual hiring has gone up. Earlier, while IT firms were looking for contractual staff in the 2-4 years of experience range, engineers with 4-8 years of experience are also comfortable with contractual employment nowadays,” said the TeamLease executive.