IT companies struggle to recruit experienced talent

Top four Indian IT firms – TCS, Infosys, HCL and Wipro – plan to hire over 1 lakh freshers this fiscal. Cognizant said in July that it plans to hire 30,000 freshers as well as 100,000 laterals this year. The latter translates to the inclusion of around 300 experienced professionals every day.

“Intention to hire and being able to hire are two different things. To onboard about 400 laterals a day, you need to hire about 700 people,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno. There is a need to offer in the day, as the drop out ratio in most IT services enterprises is over 40%.

IT companies have strong recruitment processes and large talent acquisition teams. “But even with that potential, it is a challenging year for lateral hires to be sure. If the mix between freshers and laterals is 75:25, then it is possible,” said Karanth.

Offer acceptance rates have dropped dramatically, especially for skills with severe shortages. Xpheno data shows that offer acceptance rates for roles such as full-stack engineers, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers in IT services companies have fallen by over 80%, to nearly 45%.

Saravanan Balasundaram, CEO of talent consultancy firm Haan Digital, said the onboarding ratio for IT services firms to total offers has come down by 50% as employees are sitting on multiple offers. He said companies are taking extraordinary nod to offer higher salaries so that candidates have less time to shop for other offers. “Some IT firms are willing to offer bonuses for joining early and lock out candidates in mid-level roles,” he said.

Sriram Rajagopali, MD of talent solutions firm Diamondpick, said there has been a 100% increase in salaries for key roles in cloud, cloud native, mean stack developers (a JavaScript-based framework for developing web applications), said the managing partner of talent solutions firm DiamondPick. “In our recent recruits, around 100 did not accept the offer and when we ran a survey, the data showed that these specialized roles got a 94 per cent increase in salary from their current compensation. There are outliers that can achieve more,” he said.

Rajagopal said sales force, S4 Hana and Snowflake certification command a very good premium. even good Java Developers with in-demand microservices skills are in great demand. “We have seen Java developers with five years of experience go from Rs 7.5 lakh to around Rs 14 lakh.

All this will make hiring extremely challenging for IT services companies.

But Shiv Prasad Nanduri, VP and business head of IT staffing TeamLease Digital, said firms should be able to do this through a combination of on-campus and off-campus hiring, including recruiting people with one year’s experience on a hire-and-deploy model. “Companies are partnering with a number of boutique training organizations, and are even considering a contractual workforce,” he said. Bharat Times English News