Campus hiring to be 60% lower: Som Mittal.
By R. Chandrasekaran
CHENNAI: Hiring in the IT sector in India will witness about 17 percent drop this fiscal year, says the National Association of Software Service Companies’ (NASSCOM) chairman Som Mittal.
This is not surprising to analysts considering that IT engineering graduates are finding placement a tough proposition in the current economic condition. Also, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys recruited less number of professionals than Wipro during the June quarter despite their leadership in the sector. Significantly, IT hiring among the top four IT companies plummeted 60 percent over the last year during the same period.
Mittal also says in an interview to a news agency that campus hiring is likely to be 60 percent of what it was last year. This suggests that the companies are now-a-days preferring to hire trained professionals than to train them.
Mittal pointed out the change in hiring focus also. He said that currently only 40 percent of the concentration is on technical skills, and soft skills and domain forms the rest, unlike three years ago where 80 percent of the focus of the IT companies was on technical skills.
The uncertain economic conditions have also limited the attrition level since it has come down to approximately 14 – 15 percent from the earlier average level of around 20 percent.
There are more IT graduates available now unlike before the recession struck in 2008 – 09. For instance, an estimated 1.3 million engineering graduates are expected to have come out from the colleges in the current year compared to 365K in 2005. Hiring was very strong in 2006-07 when IT companies recruited about 400K engineers. However, this came to half in the last year.
The NASSCOM chief says there could a net addition of about 150K – 180K IT professionals in the current fiscal year, compared to 180K in the previous year.