The Hindu Business Line : IT sector set to hire at scorching pace

The last ten days saw three of the top five Indian IT vendors announcing colossal hiring numbers: about 70,000 new jobs to their rolls during the current financial year.

This hiring pace, if kept up for one more year, will give the tech pool the magical number of one million software engineers, say industry observers.

The warm-up to the landmark has already been set: Largest software exporter TCS said it would add 30,500 during the year while Infosys Technologies said it would hire 25,000.

Satyam expects to hire 12,000 and Wipro Ltd, though not disclosed, may lap up over 15,000 engineers. The projected hiring figures include ITeS jobs, but a large chunk will be engineering jobs.

1-million-mark

Mr Gautam Sinha, CEO, TVA Infotech, says the IT job market is inching towards the one-million mark and expects this to happen in 2008. Current estimates peg the size of Indian IT job market at 6,00,000 to 7,00,000, and combined with IteS, it has already crossed the million-employee mark.

Driving this job creation is a strong momentum in the offshoring and outsourcing activities of top global firms.

It's not just home-grown tech firms that are gung-ho about hiring. Global IT majors such as Accenture and IBM Global Services too are rapidly scaling up their operations in the country.

CLSA report

A recent CLSA report said that global majors will sign off FY06 employing about 90,000 people in India as compared to 60,000 at the end of FY05, a growth of 50 per cent.

IBM's headcount in India stands at close to 40,000 while that of Accenture is around 20,000.

"Interestingly, this job market will grow mainly because of freshers' intake," says Mr Sinha.

TCS expects to add 15,000, about half of its projected 30,500 hires, from the campuses and would absorb the rest from the market.

Similarly, Infosys expects to hire about 60-65 per cent of its projected hires from the campuses. TCS and Infosys have already made some 9,200 and 6,800 campus offers each.

"The Indian firms may end up recruiting more than what they have already projected," says Mr Sinha. This could be easily predicted by their track records.

For instance, TCS at the beginning of FY06 planned to add some 10,000 to its rolls. Eventually, TCS ended up adding more than double of (21,140) what it had planned earlier.

Similarly, Infosys planned a gross addition of 12,600 at the beginning of FY06. Eventually, it ended up adding close to double its earlier projections at 22,868.

Sourcing talent

In 2005, about 1.75 lakh engineers joined the IT club. Mr Madan Padaki, Director, MeritTrac Services, says that every year, about 3.75 lakh people are made ready by the academia to the industry.

This includes BSc (Comp Sc), BCA, BTech and BE grads, but what is pertinent is that only about 8-10 per cent of these graduates are actually employable by the industry, though companies recruit others for want of talent. "A demand-led industry is good, but the conversion rates are scary." Mr Padaki feels that in the current conversion rates, the country needs to produce one and a half times more talent to feed the industry or improve the conversion rates to 15 per cent. "The only other option is to move beyond Tier I colleges for talent hunt," is his view.

Mr Kris Lakshmikanth, Managing Director, The Head Hunters India, says that though the bulk of the recruitment will come from campuses, big companies such as Infy and TCS will rely on their huge recruitment engines to rope in a good number of laterals (2-3 years experience engineers).

"These companies have large number of recruiters, some as large as 200 people and they can manage numbers 20,000-30,000 engineers," he says.

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