While several IT giants have made news over the past few weeks amid reports of mass layoffs, it looks like these firms are also having a tough time hiring and retaining employees. The IT sector was once one of the most popular and sought after industries by job-seekers, but it has now been said that three of the five IT giants have witnessed their workforce dwindle in the first quarter of the year.
The five IT giants – Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Tech Mahindra – which totally had 9,84,913 employees at the end of the quarter ended June 30 saw the number decline by 1,821 people, reported LiveMint.
TCS had 3,87,223 employees at the end of the previous quarter but ended the June quarter with 3,85,809 employees, which is a decline of 1,414 workers. Similarly, Bengaluru-based Infosys witnessed a drop of 1,811 employees in the June quarter and Tech Mahindra lost about 1,713 employees.
However, bringing some positivity to the industry, Wipro and HCL Technologies are said to have added to their workforce. While Wipro added a total of about 1,309 workers through the acquisition of Infoserver and another deal it landed, HCL Technologies added 1,808 people to its existing workforce.
Other IT firms such as Larsen and Toubro Infotech Ltd, Mindtree Ltd, KPIT Technologies Ltd, Hexaware Ltd and Cyient Ltd added a total of 2,206 workers, according to the business daily.
The figures are in sharp contrast to Nasscom's claims that the IT sector is still big on hiring and have added about 1.7 lakh jobs in the 2016-17 period. Additionally, the body had earlier also said that the IT giants can be expected to hire about 1.5 lakh employees this year, which doesn't really look like a possibility as of now.
Talking about the layoffs and hiring expectations, Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar earlier told the Press Trust of India: "We categorically reject the reports of mass layoffs in the sector. FY2017 saw 1.7 lakh people being added, while in Q4 alone, the gross hiring was of over 50,000 by top five companies."
While Nasscom may have quelled the fears of numerous people, it did say that the best way to retain jobs, as well as land new ones, would be to "re-skill." The body also explained how the world was moving towards automation and digital services and employees will have to "re-skill or perish."
Automation and digitisation are some of the reasons that the IT giants are finding it hard to add to their workforce. "What required 50 programmers, analysts or accountants five years ago can be done by a handful of smart thinkers and much smarter systems," Live Mint quoted Phil Fersht, CEO of US-based HfS Research, an outsourcing research firm, as saying.
Pankaj Bansal, co-founder and chief executive officer of PeopleStrong, had earlier noted that the job cuts due to automation may not show a drastic impact right away, but it will be visible by around 2020. "The change has started, with companies introducing bots for customer service, managing warehouses, etc.," he told the daily.
Krishnamurthy Shankar, executive vice-president, group head, human resource development at Infosys also had explained earlier that automation is going to have a major impact on the way companies look to hire and retain their talent. "With automation, the number of people we are hiring in the past will not be the same. It will slow down a little bit. We are also looking at hiring very differential kind of people," Indian Express had quoted him as saying.
