War for talent heats up as attrition continues to surge at top-3 IT players

Companies are rushing to campuses in order to mitigate supply-demand imbalance

The war for talent has heated up further as Indian IT players continue to see attrition going up. Though the top three IT companies claim that attrition is coming down, the actual numbers tell a different story.

Attrition at Infosys for the Q3 of FY22 was at 25.5 per cent, up from 20.1 per cent in Q2. The situation was similar at Wipro that reported attrition at 22.7 per cent in Q3, compared to 20.5 per cent in Q2.

TCS reported an attrition of 15.3 per cent for the quarter. Though the lowest among the top three players, it is higher compared to its own 11.9 per cent reported in Q2. These numbers look especially high when compared to Accenture, which said it is witnessing attrition slowing down.

For the Q1 of FY22, the company said its attrition has fallen by 200-basis points to 17 per cent. It hired more than 50,000 people globally in Q1.

To mitigate this demand-supply imbalance, companies are rushing to campuses. Infosys said for FY22, it would onboard 55,000 freshers.  Wipro stated that for FY23, it would be onboarding 30,000 freshers, the highest ever by the company. The company said this figure will be 70 per cent higher when compared to the freshers it onboarded in FY22.

“We do see some stabilisation on a quarterly basis. The numbers that we report is on LTM (last 12 months trailing)-basis. We are focusing on interventions. These are three pronged — building careers by giving a roadmap, reward and compensation and reskilling,” said Nilanjan Roy, CFO at Infosys.

TCS — for the first half of this financial year — hired 43,000 freshers. For the second half, the company had stated that it will hire an additional 34,000 people. In Q3 itself, TCS has added 34,000 to its headcount and expects to hire more.