Wipro to hire 9,000 in 2003-04

Wipro, India's third largest infotech company, is embarking on a major recruitement drive. It plans on raising its payroll strength by almost 40 per cent or 9,000 during the current financial year.

"We will recruit 9,000 people this year, 6,000 engineers for software services and another 3,000 for business process outsourcing operations," Azim Premji, chairman, Wipro, said at a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry seminar on Friday evening.

The 3,000 recruits for the BPO operation will be for Wirpo Spectramind, which Wipro took control of last financial year. Spectramind, earlier owned by Raman Roy, is now wholly owned by Wipro.

Wipro employs nearly 24,000 people at present. Of these, 15,000 are involved in IT services, 7,000 in IT-enabled services and call centres while 2,000 are in the domestic and Asia-Pacific business.

In the April-June quarter, Wipro added 2,250 employees, taking the total head count to 21,000. Another 3,000 employees were added in July and August.

The company has in the past said the average attrition rate is around 10.5 per cent.

Senior Wipro executives did not wish to share any more information on the recruitment plan, particularly on where the software recruits would be deployed.

The company recruited 5,000 people in 2002-2003 and is considering scouring nearly 30 college campuses nationwide this year.

Wipro is not the first software biggie to announce its intentions of scaling up its headcount. Earlier this year, Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technologies, IBM and Oracle embarked on smaller recruitment sprees.

In a bid to reduce expenditure on consultants, Wipro has adopted a recruitment funneling system.

Wipro creates a shortlist of employees for future projects and hires them when the need is felt. Sources in the company say the company now runs on a zero bench.

Wipro's biggest markets still remain the US and Japan, but there is a fast growing recognition of the emerging Chinese market. Wipro is going to set up operations in China in the next two years.