TCS mulls hiking pay offer for freshers

Indian IT bellwether Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is planning to increase its pay offer to freshers recruited directly or through campus interviews, a senior official said Friday.

"We want to increase the entry-level salary offered to freshers to attract more talented youth and ensure their retention with bright opportunities to move up the value chain," TCS global Human Resources head Ajoyendra Mukherjee told reporters here.

Admitting that the salary offered to new recruits at the entry level has remained static over the years, Mukherjee said the company had started paying city allowance as an additional incentive to all employees, including trainees hired from engineering colleges or directly through online tests and personal interviews offline.

"Though we hire on an average 35,000 freshers annually, the number of applicants seeking jobs in our company is five-six times more (over 200,000) in a year, which makes us the most-sought after IT firm for fresh graduates in the country," Mukherjee asserted.

The $13-billion global software major is on target to hire 55,000 techies this fiscal (2014-15), including 35,000 engineering students from 370 institutions across the country.

The company has already made job offers to 31,000 youth in the first eight months (April-Nov) of this fiscal.

As the largest employer in the Indian IT industry as well as the private sector, TCS has a whopping 313,757 techies, including over 100,000 women employees. About 60 percent account for freshers and 40 percent laterals.

"We have a hike strike-rate (70 percent/24,500) of freshers accepting our offer letters and joining as trainees from campuses, where 99 percent of hiring takes place on day of interviews," Mukherjee claimed.

The company also hires engineers at entry and lateral levels directly or through referrals made by its senior employees or team leaders.

Though the company's human capital base is wider and twice that of peers like Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies, the attrition rate was 12.8 percent in second quarter (July-September), resulting in net addition being far less than the gross addition it made during the first six months of this fiscal.

"Our attrition rate is on par with the average rate in the industry, as a number of employees leave for various reasons, including family issues, transfers, different aspirations, in pursuit of higher studies and sabbatical," Mukherjee said.

Clarifying that the company does not believe in 'hire and fire' policy, the executive vice-president said the involuntary exit was 1-1.5 percent of the attrition rate due to non-performance or failure to specialize in a particular domain required for various projects.

"As we are a performance-oriented organisation, we look at the performance of each and every individual and measure how our employees fare through an appraisal process," Mukherjee added.