Hired over 20,000 employees in US in last 5 years: TCS

India's largest software services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has hired over 20,000 employees in the US over the last five years, which has reduced its work visa dependency and de-risked business significantly.

The Mumbai-based company, in its 2019-20 annual report, said it has accelerated its localisation programmes.

"Our delivery model has evolved over the last few years. Our Location Independent Agile promotes systematic collaboration across distributed teams and reduces the need for co-location.

"This, coupled with greater use of managed services contracting models have given us more flexibility around where our teams are based," TCS Executive Vice President and Global Head - Human Resources Milind Lakkad said.

He said TCS has hired over 20,000 employees in the last five years in the US, making it one of the top job creators in IT services and consulting.

"Every year, we hire hundreds of fresh engineering graduates and train them on new technologies. In FY2020, we hired over 2.5 times our usual fresher intake, and also made the training more account contextual, accelerating their ability to play productive, client-facing roles. For very short-term assignments, we use sub-contractors," he explained.

Lakkad said all these steps have brought down TCS' use of work visas to "a small fraction of what it used to be five years ago, de-risking our business significantly."