IT cos struggle to get experienced hands – Times of India

BENGALURU: The top four Indian IT firms – TCS, Infosys, HCL and Wipro – plan to hire more than 1 lakh freshers this fiscal. Cognizant said in July it planned to hire 30,000 freshers, as well as 100,000 laterals this year. The latter translates to onboarding nearly 300 experienced professionals every day.
“Intent to hire and able to hire are two different things. To onboard about 400 laterals a day, you need to make offers to about 700 people a day, as most IT services enterprises have a drop out ratio of more than 40%,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno.

IT companies have robust hiring processes and large talent acquisition teams. “But even with that capability, this is a challenging year to hire laterals for sure. If the mix is 75:25 between freshers and laterals, then it’s feasible,” Karanth said. Offer acceptance rates have fallen dramatically, especially for skills with severe shortages. Xpheno data shows the offer acceptance rate at IT services companies for roles like fullstack engineer, data engineer, data scientist, DevOps engineers has dropped to about 45%, from over 80%.
Saravanan Balasundaram, CEO of talent consultancy firm Han Digital, said onboarding as a proportion of total offers has dropped to less than 50% for IT services firms as employees are sitting on multiple offers. He said companies are taking exceptional approvals to make higher salary offers quickly so that candidates get less time to shop for other offers. “Some IT firms are willing to offer bonuses for early joining and are locking-in candidates at mid-level roles,” he added.
Sriram Rajagopal, managing partner of talent solutions firm Diamondpick, said there has been an increase of 100% in salaries for critical roles in cloud, cloud native, mean stack developers (JavaScript-based framework for developing web applications). “Among our recent recruits, about 100 didn’t accept the offer and when we ran a survey, data showed that these specialised roles got a 94% increase in salaries from their current compensation. There are outliers who could get more,” he said.
Rajagopal said those with Salesforce, S4 Hana and Snowflake certifications command very good premiums.