TCS plans to recruit 60,000 this fiscal

Tata Consultancy Services plans to hire 60,000 employees at a gross level in fiscal 2011-12, said Mr Ajoy Mukherjee, Vice-President and Head of Global Human Resources.

Though, this is 9,000 less than the gross hiring numbers for the fiscal gone by, company officials do not see it as a reflection of a slide in demand.

“Last year, around the same time we had expected to hire 50,000 for 2010-11, but ultimately hired 69,234. The numbers may appear conservative at the beginning of the year, but these could be upped if the demand environment continues to be robust,” said Mr Phiroz Vandrevala, Executive Director and Global Head of Corporate Affairs.

CAMPUS RECRUIT

Though majority of the hiring will be in India, the company will also scale up employment in the US, the UK, besides other overseas geographies.

Of the proposed 60,000 new faces, almost half will come from the campus. The company has already made 37,396 offers to engineering students across 343 campuses.

“For the campus offers that we have given out, we expect a joining ratio of around 70 per cent,” said Mr Mukherjee.

The campus recruits will start joining the Tata group company starting the second quarter of the current fiscal.

Majority of the 69,000 gross hirings made last year were for the company's delivery centres in India. During the quarter gone by, TCS made gross employee additions of 19,324 and net additions of 11,700.

TCS is on course to become the first Indian IT company to have more than 2 lakh employees. Its employee account, as on March 31, was 1,98,614.

ATTRITION, A CONCERN

Attrition continued to remain a concern for the country's largest software exporter. While its BPO unit reported churn of 25.49 per cent, the IT services business recorded churn of 13.13 per cent, thereby taking overall attrition to 14.4 per cent.

“BPO attrition is the highest at our centres in Latin America because the hirings generally tend to be for a fixed term on a per project basis. Even employees there prefer this model of engagement,” said Mr Mukherjee.

NYSE-listed WNS Global Services, which is the only pure play BPO company to have announced earnings till now, had reported attrition of around 43 per cent