TCS expects to exceed hiring target for FY15

Company says performance evaluation of employees is nothing new, it's a continuous process

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT services company on Friday said that the company expects to exceed the hiring target set for the ongoing fiscal. For FY2015, the Mumbai-headquartered company had set a target to hire 55,000.

"If you look at the hiring process, we are on track to hire 55,000 people and probably we will be doing more. I am not in a position to tell you how much, but we will definitely exceed that target," Ajoyendra Mukherjee, Executive Vice President and Global Head - Human Resources, TCS said.

For the fiscal, TCS had set a target to hire 35,000 fresh graduates through the campus recruitment drives. Of this, the company has already given offers to some 31,000 candidates visiting 370 engineering colleges and institutions. The rest of the freshers would be recruited through 'pool campus' programme wherein the selection of the candidates from these colleges would happen in one place instead of visiting to each location separately, he added.

However, the company has not made any change to the compensation package offered to the freshers over the last few years which continues to be in the range of Rs 3.2 lakh to Rs 3.5 lakh per annum. Mukherjee said while this is a supply side issue, the company would review this at appropriate time. Last year, TCS had introduced 'city allowance' as a part of which freshly joined employees get extra allowance based on the types of cities where they have been posted.

Among the Indian IT services companies, TCS is perhaps the only company which has kept its hiring momentum almost intact on the back of steady business performance and outlook. The company presently has around 313,757 employees on rolls belonging to 119 nationalities, which makes it the largest private sector employer in India.

Regarding the reports on the company's plan to review the performance of middle and senior level employees, Mukherjee said it is a continuous process and there is nothing new in it.

"We are a performance oriented organization and look at each and every individual. We are an organization where we would like people to come in and make a career, and continue to grow, while doing so there are some business needs and people aspirations and both of those have to match to a certain extent. This results in some involuntary attrition. It?s not a target driven exercise," he added.

TCS is one of the selected few Indian IT services companies which has kept its employee attrition rate quite low. In the quarter ended September 30, 2014, the company's attrition rate stood at 12.8%, slightly higher than the previous quarter which the company had said was primarily due to the seasonality of employee movement.