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Even though the country’s largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is recruiting almost 55,000 people in the current fiscal which includes 25,000 college graduates, it does see some challenges in terms of its overall hiring going forward given the shift of the industry towards digital.
The other challenges for TCS pertain to the size of the organization (which employees close to 3,00,000 people), its presence in about 55 countries and the sheer dynamic nature of the industry.
Ajoy Mukherjee, global head and vice president – human resources of TCS said, “The industry we are in is too dynamic in technology, business model, and domain and so we need to continuously build the skill.” Referring to the digitisation of services, he added that the skill set needed is diverse and so the leadership has to be built for such skills.
Though Mukherjee did mention that wage hikes would be done in April, he refrained from giving the quantum of the hikes and said that it would be largely market driven.
For FY14, the company had announced an average wage hike between 7-10 per cent.
“As demand goes up in the market, there is a possibility of losing talent. So we need to be competitive in the market. While we offer a challenging role to the employee to retain talent, we cannot afford to not pay well and expect them to take up challenges.”
Earlier in the day, TCS chief N Chandrasekaran had said that the company is likely to perform better than the industry projection given out by lobby body Nasscom. The over $100 billion IT industry is expected to grow between 13 to 15 per cent in the fiscal 2014-15, Nasscom said. “We will certainly come ahead of the Nasscom guidance,” he told Business Standard.
Mukherjee said that as growth picks up, the company will also have to try to keep its attrition level low as competition will try to poach talent. He added that if having skilled manpower is one challenge, presence in several countries is another one since immigration laws of every country have to be complied with. “We have to be perfectly complying with the immigration laws of all countries and have to be above the line,” he said.
The industry key market – United States is currently in the process of finalizing an immigration bill which could make could curtail the Indian IT industry from sending employees overseas.
