Wipro, Infosys, TCS to hire 50,000 in a year

The country's top three information technology companies""Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys""plan to raise their work force by a over third in the next 12 months by hiring 50,000 employees to keep pace with rapidly growing business.

Each of the three companies is growing at 30 per cent per annum. Wipro is planning to add 18,200 employees in the coming one year to a base of 45,835 employees. That is about 40 per cent of the company's total work force.

Infosys will add about 16,000 to its rolls during the period. TCS is planning to add a total of 15,000 employees to its work force over the next one year. "This is our conservative estimate," said a TCS executive.

With their global delivery models well in place, most of the hirings are planned in India. "Less than 2,000 employees will be hired for the company's overseas operations," A Nair, vice-president (strategic resourcing), Wipro, said. The same holds true for TCS and Infosys. TCS plans to hire only 3,000 employees for overseas affairs.

Interestingly, a large part of the additions is not meant for BPO operations of the IT majors. "The hiring is much more for the companies' core IT solutions business, even though the employee base of the BPO business is smaller," Nair said.

With the large number of hiring, companies like Infosys are processing over 1.3 million job applications a year. Infosys plans to hire about 5,000 employees at its biggest campus which is coming up at the Mahindra city in Chennai.

With the rapid growth in the IT sector and Indian companies becoming globally competitive, big firms are all set to replace traditional manufacturing business groups like the Tatas and public sector giants like the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) as large employers. Tata Steel has 48,000 employees on its rolls while SAIL employs 1,32,000.