Companies hiring laterals with good salary hikes

Last year many laterals had to quit their jobs as the companies said that they cannot pay high salaries. But now the good times are back for the laterals as companies are hiring lateral and also offering good salary hikes.

In the latest quarter Infosys’s attrition rate has increased by 11.8% which is up from 11.6% in the quarter before, and a low of 10.8%. In general, this rise in attrition rate is feasible for the IT industry as year ago its attrition rate used to be 18-20% which fell to 5-6%. But it has moved up to 10-12%.

C Mahalingam, senior VP for HR in Symphony Services said, ‘‘Attrition has picked up. Jobs are being created. This year, people who stay back will get a tiny salary increment of 5-6%, while a job change will give them an increase of at least 10-15%. That’s why many are moving.’’ However TOI could not confirm about this from the concerned companies, but companies like IBM, Talisma and Yes Bank have certainly hired lateral – with two-three years’ experience and have offered salaries that were 50% to 100% higher than in their previous jobs.

IT Company Aditi’s CEO Pradeep Rathinam told his company has 100 open positions in India. He said, “We are looking for technical people, solution architects. People are asking for 40-50% hikes, but we expect to give about 20% hikes over their existing salaries.The slowdown has brought expectations down to more realistic levels.”

Two years ago there used to be mass hiring but this time it is not yet that kind. But as the companies get the orders it will be matter of time they will have to speed up their hiring drive. Manish Sabrawal, MD of manpower company TeamLease says, “After a severe drought, jobs are back again. Salaries will also get better moderately, from the negative to zero increments that one saw last year.”

Kris Laxmikanth, MD of Headhunters, stated in the tech sector the hiring process will take a little more time to speed up – “it’s currently waiting for customer budgets to be finalized” but infrastructure firms like GVK, GMR, L&T, IVRCL, and sectors like construction, media-advertisement, PR, event management, manufacturing, oil and gas, telecom, automotive and logistics, FMCG, tours & travel, consumer durables and banking and financial services and insurance have all begin hiring.

Indian IT firms doing aggressive hiring overseas

The Indian IT companies are going overseas for hiring, besides engineering campuses in India. The companies are carrying out aggressive hiring process in the US and in other global markets.

The IT companies are trying to grab this trillion dollar opportunity. This year US government has opened doors for IT companies to sign contracts and according to analysts Indian technology firms are trying to grab the opportunity in order to increase revenues from the US. Many companies hiring Americans for these projects. Infosys, one of the top IT firm has made plans for aggressive targets to hire locally in the US.

V Balakrishnan, Chief Financial Officer, Infosys Technologies, points out, “The US is a large opportunity, today about 5% of all our employees are local. Going ahead 15% of all our employees will be foreign nationals. This will hold true for our newly formed subsidiary in the US too.”

According to IT consultants the tier-one Indian IT companies will approximately hire between 5,000-10,000 people and tier-II and tier-III firms will be hiring up to 1,000 people over the medium to long term in the US alone.

Siddharth Pai, Managing Director, TPI India, said, “Depending on the company and the business strategy of course, anything between 15-20% of workforce will be foreign hires.”

US, is not the only country on the target of IT firm for hiring. For instance Infosys, points out it will go for more local hiring in the Europe also, especially as it is seeing increase in demand from these countries.

IT companies returning to engineering colleges for hiring

This year IT companies will be visiting engineering colleges for recruitments. The companies will be looking for the students who will be passing out next year.

According to placement offices of engineering colleges and recruitment agencies IT companies will be visiting campuses as early as the end of this month and will be carrying out recruitments till February. They are expecting more companies will be visiting as well as hiring more students than last year.

Madan Padaki, chief executive officer of Merit Trac, an assessment agency, told, “The forecast for the IT industry is looking up. More companies are interested in hiring in large numbers. But they are still cautious.”

In 2010, January and February are the two months when most of the companies are likely to visit campus. It would be just-in-time hiring, and recruited candidates will be joining work only in May and June, according to Anshuman Das, CEO of Careernet, an agency which recruits on behalf of the IT sector.

Each year from India’s engineering colleges over 3,00,000 students graduate and from these half of them get jobs in the IT/BPO sector. But from 2009 batch the hiring was half the normal level. Industry trackers believe the level might get back to normal this time.

The focus will be mainly on the top 50 colleges from where 500 engineers on an average pass out every year.

This year top hires include TCS, Infosys, Wipro, IBM, HP, Sapient, MindTree, Aricent, Robert Bosch, Adobe, NetApp, Patni, Cognizant and Accenture.

Among them Infosys and Wipro will be exceptions. Although the two companies have announced their plans of hiring 13,000 and 5,000 students, but the numbers will be fewer in comparison to last year.

Nandita Gurjar, human resources head of Infosys pointed out that her company will be recruiting over 13,000 till February as against the 18,000 hired over the entire last year. The company will be visiting only 700 colleges. In the years before recession, the company used to visit around 1,000 colleges.

On the other hand Wipro vice-president for talent acquisition, Pradeep Bahirwani said this year the potential number will be around 5,000, while last year it offered job to 7,500. The last of these recruits has joined the company this month only.

The colleges are happy this year. N Vijayadev, placement head at Bangalore’s M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology, said, “About 120 to 125 companies turn up every year on our campus. But last year there were only 100. This year we expect a larger turnout.”

M S Dasgupta, placement chief at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, told last year in January, the second half of the placement cycle was badly affected by the global crisis. “This year we expect the second half to go better. About 200 companies have been contacted.”

Mahindra Satyam set to hire 120 employees and recalls its employees

Mahindra Satyam is proposed to hire 120 employees and has called back its employees who were working with the company this was reported by CNBC-TV18’s Kritika Saxena.

The company will be hiring 120 employees in the next one months and also has called back 1,400 of its 6,000 employees who were working with the firm. According to CNBC-TV18 the company has opened hiring in view of new deals being signed by the company this quarter especially in the emerging markets.

CP Gurnani, CEO, Mahindra Satyam informed, “For our business strategy and growth, we started working with Bain & Company, a high-end consulting. With them, we have come out with a new value proposition for our clients. We are definitely engaging and trying to get some additional leverage from opening new markets like defence and providing new service offerings like ICT.”

According to Gurnani this quarter has been better than expected and is sure that Mahindra Satyam will be able to meet the deadline of June 2010 to submit its re-stated accounts.

Gurnani added, “As of date, KPMG is confident that they will be able to declare the accounts and give it within the stipulated period. It’s not about one day. It is going to take one step at a time. If one step I take everyday like this, I will be in good shape”.

Mahindra Satyam has worked hard on its plan to acquire customers. The company has been able to acquire more customers as some of its clients have increased their IT budget. Further, Mahindra Satyam is expecting to hire a larger number of employees and call back more from the bench.

IT companies going to mid-tier colleges also for hiring

The IT companies usually visit premier engineering colleges for hiring but this year after recovering from recession hangover the companies are also visiting mid-tier colleges also. Officials from various colleges have confirmed that firms such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HP, Cisco, Sapient, IBM, Convergys BPO and Symphony Services are planning to hire in a big way.

At BMS college of Engineering out of 800-900 students passing out in January 2010, 100 have already got placed with the salary package ranging between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4.5 lakh per annum. BMS placement officer HS Jagadeesh said, “I am confident that even in difficult situation, there will be over 50% placement”. He informed the companies such as NetApp, HP, Aricent, Goldman Sachs, Infosys, Wipro, MindTree, and public sector units like HAL and BEML will be hiring from the college.

According to HKBK College of Engineering sources companies such as Infosys and Wipro, and a group of smaller companies will be hiring from its batch of 380 students. Abdul Hameed SA, administrator at HKBK said, “IT companies now prefer to recruit final year students. However, there are many engineering students sitting on the bench and companies prefer to place them first, because of their experience”.

RV College of Engineering’s director for placement NS Narahari stated that around 100 companies have been invited to the college for hiring. HP and Informatica have already visited the campus, while Wipro and Infosys have assured to come in January 2010.

R Nalini, principal at AVC College of Engineering, informed that the college has received confirmation from TCS, Infosys and Wipro that they will be visiting the campus in January 2010 for freshers hiring from the batch of 500 students and the college is expecting more than 50% placement. In 2009 very few students of RVS Engineering College got placed, but this year the college is expecting better placements. An official said, “The situation was so bad that even BPOs had stopped visiting the campus”.

In view of weak dollar and the impact of credit crisis this year students are ready to accept salaries ranging between Rs 1.8 lakh and Rs 5 lakh.

According to a techie, who was waiting in a long queue for a job interview on Diwali day, “IT firms are hiring in large numbers, but you may not get the desired position or salary”.  GC Jayaprakash, principal consultant at Stanton Chase International pointed out over the past two quarters firms have started expanding their operations in India which has led to increase in outsourcing contracts.

He added, “These companies do not want to lose out any more business due to the non-availability of human resources”. Now the firms in collaboration with colleges and universities have started providing technical skills to the students in order to make students industry-ready and save time on training. Mr Jayaprakash said, “Some engineering colleges are even offering to send their students to onsite locations of various firms”.

HP Khincha, vice-chancellor of VTU, stated, “To increase employability of the students, we are making efforts to bring the industry and academia together.”

The engineering graduates in case are unable to find jobs have started getting enrolled for  higher education and core subjects such as mechanical, electronic and civil engineering.

IT firms plans to hire large number of freshers

The companies are recovering from downturn have started visiting colleges not just the premier engineering colleges but also mid-tier ones. According to officials of several colleges the big firms such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HP, Cisco, Sapient, IBM, Convergys BPO and Symphony Services are planning to hire freshers on high number.

BMS college of Engineering, out of the 800-900 students, 100 of the students who will be passing out in January 2010, have already got placed with salary offers ranging between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4.5 lakh per annum. BMS placement officer HS Jagadeesh said, “I am confident that even in difficult situation, there will be over 50% placement”. He told the companies such as HP, Aricent, Goldman Sachs, Infosys, Wipro, MindTree, and public sector units like HAL and BEML are likely to hire from the college.

On the other hand HKBK College of Engineering is expecting companies, such as Infosys and Wipro, and a host of smaller companies visit campus to hire from its batch of 380 students. “IT companies now prefer to recruit final year students. However, there are many engineering students sitting on the bench and companies prefer to place them first, because of their experience,” said Abdul Hameed SA, administrator at HKBK.

RV College of Engineering’s director for placement NS Narahari told that around 100 companies have been invited to the campus. Few of the firms like HP and Informatics have already visited the campus, while Wipro and Infosys will be visiting in January 2010.

R Nalini, principal at AVC College of Engineering told the companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro have informed them that they will be visiting their campus in January 2010 to hire freshers from their batch of 500 students and it is expecting more than 50% placement. However for 2009 there has been less hiring from RVS Engineering College, but this time it expects better placements. According to an official, “The situation was so bad that even BPOs had stopped visiting the campus”.

Although, students are aware of the weak dollar and the impact of the credit crisis, therefore are ready to get hired on salaries ranging between Rs 1.8 lakh and Rs 5 lakh.

“IT firms are hiring in large numbers, but you may not get the desired position or salary,” said a techie, who waited in a long queue for a job interview on Diwali day. GC Jayaprakash, principal consultant at Stanton Chase International, told over the past two quarters firms have started expanding their operations in India which will has led to increase in outsourcing contracts.

“These companies do not want to lose out any more business due to the non-availability of human resources,” he said. To save time on training companies are associating with colleges and universities to provide technical skills to the students to make them industry-ready. “Some engineering colleges are even offering to send their students to onsite locations of various firms,” said Mr Jayaprakash.

HP Khincha, vice-chancellor of VTU, said, “To increase employability of the students, we are making efforts to bring the industry and academia together.”

However engineering graduates who could not get jobs are enrolling for higher education and core subjects such as mechanical, electronic and civil engineering.

IITs prepare for placement season in December

Finally the students of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) can feel better as from December the placement season is going to take kick off and also the offers have started pouring in the country’s premium engineering colleges.

All the seven IITs are getting pre-placement offers (PPOs), or job offers are being given to students after summer internships and before campus placements before this year, as Indian corporates have started hiring after the economy has shown signs of revival.

According to Prof PK Jain who is taking care of campus placements at IIT-Roork “Things are better this year and we even see a 10-20% increase in average salaries”.

Now graduates can observe a 10-20% hike in salaries as against last year when the average offers had dropped by 30% to around Rs 6 lakh due to global recession and due to slowing economy many recruiters put off their expansion plans and did cost cutting. Now the economy is reviving back therefore number of companies are already in process of recruiting from the top tech schools.

State-owned National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) is proposed to hire 300 students from across IITs and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), R C Srivastava, the state-run power company’s director for human resources said. There will be increase in the salary offers to around 70% to Rs10 lakh in line with revised pay scales on 6th Pay Commission recommendations.

Many state-owned companies, especially from the core sector, are offering jobs to IITs, also the big companies like Larsen & Toubro, Gas Authority of India, Tata Motors, Oracle, JP Morgan and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), who usually hire 10-15 students, will be returning to these institutes.

As per the information provided by Ministry of Human Resource and Development in the last placement season the multinational hiring from IITs had gone down to 1,606 from 3,031 in 2007-08.

The tech companies such as IBM and consultants KPMG, McKinsey, BCG and Ersnt&Young are also expected to return this year.

Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield-services provider, last year had given the highest package of $100,000 is likely to come back this year.

The Adobe Systems, a US-based software company is likely to hire 4-5 graduates from each of the seven IITs, whereas finance companies such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank have already given offers to some students.

This year till now IIT-Kharagpur has received around 15-20 PPOs and is expected to go up to 40. But IIT-Madras has been able to get around 25 PPOs while IIT-Guwahati has received 20 but expects seven more to come. On the other hand IIT-Roorkee is expecting its PPOs to touch last year’s mark of 35. However IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kanpur have received less than 10 and 5 PPOs, respectively.

IT companies are expected to visit institutes after Diwali while the Nasscom advisory is likely to visit campuses closer to graduation dates.

The tech schools on their part are ensuring high participation this year in the placement season and are inviting more companies and improving facilities. Prof Jain of IIT-Roorkee stated, “We are trying every bit not to let go of the opportunity this time”.

IIT-Kharagpur is making all arrangement to give better facilities to the recruiters. Following this it is adding 10 new interview chambers to the existing 40 and also adding similar number for guesthouses within the campus. Even the students’ call centre team has been beefed to provide up dated placement related information to the recruiters.

This year IIT-Madras will be calling 300 more recruiters adding to last year’s list of 500, while IIT-Roorkee will be calling on 1,500 recruiters, up from 1,000 last year.

Usually, IITs got very few PPOs unlike Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) as except for few Kharagpur, Delhi and Guwahati, also internships are not mandatory.

Moreover out of 20-30% students, who go for internship, opted for research projects in academic institutions abroad.

Most of the institutes don’t have a formal internship cell, but the students try to tap faculty contacts to do internship. This year IIT-Bangalore opened a formal internship cell during summers. The institutes are doing all this in order to save campuses from dry spells.

IITs students waiting for PPOs

The companies who had given offer letters to the students for this year are still waiting for the appointment.

Around 15 per cent of the students of the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) were given pre-placement offers (PPOs), while this year the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has witnessed “very slow” flow of PPOs.

The placement offers given to final year students who are, or were trainees, in the company during their internships is known as PPOs. This year the final placement process at IITs is likely to start from December and go on till April-May.

An anonymous IIT professor expressing his regret said, “Last year the slowdown started post September, and the PPOs were secured by that time. Though we did receive some regret letters later, overall the situation was better. PPOs, so far this year, do not show much promise”.

However IIT-Delhi students have just started getting PPOs and the institute is expecting core engineering and IT companies to be major recruiters. This year IT companies are expected to place around 1,000 students. Kushal Sen, Prof-In-Charge, Training And Placement Cell, IIT-Delhi said, “Traditionally our recruiters have hired in small numbers of up to 15 per company. Last year, we had 225 companies on campus and similar number is expected this year. We are expecting most of our past recruiters to come to campus”.

Meanwhile at IIT-Roorkee, FMCG major ITC and engineering major Schlumberger have already completed hiring process. This year from the institute around 600 MTech students and 500 BTech students will be placed in the company. Whereas last year there was around 88 per cent placement in BTech and 55 per cent placement in MTech from the institute.

Also companies like ITC, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Adobe are in touch with IIT-Guwahati students and have issued PPOs. According to the institute about 10-12 students have received PPOs and the number is expected to increase in the coming days. Saurabh Basu, Faculty In-Charge, Training & Placement, IIT-Guwahati told, “Placements haven’t been that good so far but with the recession effect slowing down in India, we are expecting placements to look up from the next month onwards. Some of the companies that deferred hiring last time have shown interest in coming to the campus”.

The institute sources said it is expecting public sector companies will visit this year and would be the major recruiters. Basu said, “We have a branch of Math and Computing where students are looking forward to working with financial organizations. We are expecting some of the financial companies to hire students from this batch”.

This year about 250-odd companies were invited to the institute campus. There will be around 650 eligible students for placements out of which there are 329 BTech students, 200 MTech students and rest PHDs. However last year from BTech branch there was 87 percent placement whereas the MTech batch witnessed 55 per cent placement. The recruiters for the 2008-09 session included Adobe, IOCL, Sail, BEL, John Deere, BHEL, Cognizant, Microsoft, Godrej and RIL.

Also at IIT-Kanpur, companies have started visiting the campus for pre-placement talk and internship interviews. This year the first batch of nearly 15 MSc Economics students will be sitting for placements. For this the institute has already started talks with various banks. Also 500 BTech students will be sitting for placement. In 2005 IIT-Kanpur had introduced five-year program in MSc economics. In 2008-09 placements, from the seven IITs, the number of student being recruited by MNCs has come down to 1606 against a total of 3,031 selections in 2008, the Ministry of Human Resource and Development said.

Tech Mahindra gives new offer to waiting campus recruits

The IT sectors have yet to recover from recession shadow but the Network Implementation Services domain is moving out of recession shadow. Thus it has been more than a year, over 3,000 campus hiring are waiting to join the telecom solutions company which owns a domineering stake in the former Satyam Computer Services. The company has given them the option of joining its network implementation services practice at reduced salary packages.

In his recent e-mail sent to the campus recruit, Tech Mahindra had written after analyzing the business growth of this domain and its future prospects, “we are glad to share with you our plans for adding fresh engineering graduates to our Network Implementation Services operations in the near future”.  The candidates who accept this offer, the salary package offered will be Rs 1.7 lakh per annum which is Rs 1.2 lakh less than what the campus recruits were supposed to get as per the company’s initial commitment.

In case the freshers do not accept this offer, the company has told that “its earlier offer issued through campus selection stands good and very much valid”, but will depend only as and when company has the requirement.

Earlier from January onwards the company has put more than 100 employees on a “leave without pay” scheme. The two of the employees told Business Line that most of the employees who have been asked to go on a leave without pay had joined last September and were undergoing training at Tech Mahindra. On the other hand company in a recent communication to these employees who have been trained but not given placement, has said, “leave without pay”, period has now been extended for another six months till February 23, 2010.

But now there has been an update in the above communication. While the Business Line was waiting for responses from Tech Mahindra, company had sent an e-mail to two fresher informing that their leave without pay has been cut short, they have been asked to report for work on September 22 at Tech Mahindra`s Noida office. Till the time of printing of this news company had given no reply to a questionnaire pertaining to the same issue.  In May this year Tech Mahindra in a conference told analysts that the hiring of freshers has put been put on hold for at least the next two quarters.

TCS to hire 25,000, IT industry to get fillip

TCS a software leader has announced its plan of hiring 25,000 people this year. With this the hiring process in IT industry will get a fillip in the country which witnessed slowdown since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September.

TCS Vice President (Head Global Government Industry Group) Tanmoy Chakrabarty said on the sidelines of a function in Chandigarh, “We have employee strength of 1.45 lakh people and we want to add 25,000 more people this year”.

TCS announcing its first quarter results informed that it has been in the process of graduate hiring program in 2009-10.

According to analysts hopeful hiring plans of TCS has come as a boom to the hiring process after a big, long dull in the segment which will reinvigorate IT recruitment scene. Earlier the domestic IT companies had stopped the fresh recruitment after the biggest market US slipped into recession following global financial crisis.

The Indian software companies bigger chunk of there revenue was coming from the US, thus recruitment was the first one to face the impact of the global financial crisis.

Chakrabarty pointed out, “Our revenue from government projects is small and we want to raise it to at least 10 per cent of our total revenue in the next three years”.

TCS also informed about the implementation of the Center’s ambitious Rs 1,000-crore ‘Passport Seva Project’ at six pilot locations in October this year after which its number will reach to 77 by June 2010.