The Hindu Business Line : Employee mix: Are you getting IT right?

Is younger actually better? HR experts are now warning IT companies to watch out for a skewed employee mix where fresh recruits dominate the numbers. "This will impact deliverables," says an HR expert at a leading talent consultancy firm in Bangalore.

At Infosys, the country's most-quoted IT company for its innovative HR practices, the total number of hires (YTD) in FY '06 stands at 13,973 out of which 10,770 have come from campuses. And about 76 per cent of employees are with less than three years experience with the average age of an Infoscion about 26 years. "Over the years, there has been too much dependence on freshers. This strategy has to change as it may impact the company's deliverables," says the consultant. In fact, consultancy firms have been predicting a middle management crisis at the company. The reason for this, they point out, is the reducing number of people with more than three years' experience.

Compare Infy's recruitment strategy with its competitors: Industry sources say that Wipro has fine-tuned the process and `has a recruitment rhythm in place.'

Wipro's campus recruits form about 45-55 per cent of their recruits every year, and it's the same with TCS. At Cognizant Technology, about 60 per cent of its new-recruits were from campuses in the calendar year 2005.

Says the Bangalore-based consultant, "If Infy wants to move up the value chain and move to more complex applications development work, then this mix has to change to include more laterals."

Mr Mervyn Raphael, an HR consultant and promoter of Performance Consulting International, says that increasingly IT companies are hoarding `large number of bodies' with an average level of intelligence. "This creates disillusionment among freshers who after six months find that there has been a position-person mismatch." Companies have to treat campus recruitment as a long-term strategy and not as a short-term need to be fulfilled.

When asked to comment on this, Infosys said, "We are a role-based organisation and have adequate number of people to fit the roles envisaged in our structure. For our IT services, apart from laterals from the market, we hire mainly engineering graduates who are in the top 20 per cent of their colleges."

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