TCS to hire 50,000, 50 percent from campuses

New Delhi: Indian IT services major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is expected to hire more than 50,000 employees in this financial year earlier target of 30,000 persons. TCS will hire 50 percent more students from campuses for 2011-12. TCS will start visiting campuses from November. TCS, the country's largest IT firm, during the July-September quarter, added 10,717 employees compared to 7,522 in October-December 2007. TCS has upgraded its gross hiring target from 40,000 to 50,000 on the back of higher demand. The total headcount of the company is 1.74 lakh at the end of September 2010. Similarly, rival Infosys is stepping up its hiring plans for the next few quarters and has announced to hire 40,000 new employees, up from the earlier projection of 36,000. The current hiring by the company has been the highest in the last three years. The company added 7,646 employees during the July-September quarter. At TCS, the attrition rate increased marginally to 14.1 percent in July-September from 13.1p percent during the preceding April-June quarter. In case of Infosys, it went up from 15.8 percent to 17 percent.The recovery in business environment has led IT majors like Infosys and TCS to hire aggressively again. This comes after more than a year of muted hiring during the global economic downturn as clients cut IT budgets to tide over the slowdown. Software firms are also hiring aggressively to cope up with the high attrition rates as demand for experienced professionals’ returns.

Official reports say that TCS is planning to expand its China operations in the coming years, for which it need to hire people to manage capacity. "Though we have one of the lowest attrition numbers in the industry, they are not acceptable and we will work towards bringing this down," said Ajoy Mukherjee, Vice-President and Head, Global Human Resources of TCS.