Infosys plans to broaden hiring on campus through technology platform

After Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) introduced a ‘National Qualifier Test’ for recruiting engineering graduates, Infosys has launched a learning platform, ‘InfyTQ’, which it is planning to use for campus hiring.

“Earlier, due to absence of technology, our presence was limited to a certain number of colleges,” says UB Pravin Rao, chief operating officer. “The platform was launched around nine months back and the idea is to use the data to hire fresh graduates.”

According to the information technology services major, all graduates from various engineering colleges are encouraged to register on this platform, where a lot of training material is shared with the students by Infosys. Certifications in various new-age technologies are also available on it, which students will get after clearing the examinations. “Anyone who has cleared our certification will be a strong candidate for us to recruit,” Rao said.

TCS launched its National Qualifier Test last year and says this eliminated the need for campus visits and cut hiring time to six weeks from the earlier four months. Around 220,000 candidates appeared for the first such test it conducted.

According to Infosys, InfyTQ is an extension of its ‘Lex’ platform, which is mainly aimed at re-skilling of its employees. “Our belief is that there is always a shortage of talent. A big part of our requirement will come from re-skilling of our employees,” Rao said. With the emergence of new technologies, digital technologies in industry parlance, all big IT companies are changing their employee mix, with more fresher hiring. "We are focused on improving the bottom-end of the pyramid, which had become more barrel-shaped, by hiring freshers," Nilanjan Roy, chief financial officer at Infosys, said last week in an analyst meet. 

Similarly, Cognizant is planning to hire around 23,000 fresh graduates in 2020 from various technical institutions in India. Another tech major, Wipro, added around 9,000 such new hires in the first half of the current financial year. "We want to be really prepared. That's the reason we are building up a huge cadre and are preparing for the demand through training and re-skilling our people well. These initiatives should reflect on our revenue in the next two-three quarters," Saurabh Govil, president and chief human resources officer at Wipro had said in a recent interaction.