The top three of India’s IT companies have firmly put the Covid-19 pandemic behind them, as they hired a number of employees.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, and Infosys have reported a sharp jump in net employee hiring in the December quarter in the midst of strong revenue performance and the signing of record deals. Net employee hiring is considered to be a key metric to show the strength of a sector.

TCS has a 59 percent increment with a net expansion of 15,721 workers within the third quarter over the previous quarter. Q3 net employee hiring was the most elevated ever in a quarter, said the company’s CFO V Ramakrishnan in an analyst call.
And,
Infosys’ noticed about eight times in Q3 to 9,104, whereas Wipro’s rose 47 percent to 5,065.

When the pandemic was at its crest, i.e. in the June quarter, the three companies detailed negative net hiring. But, in the September quarter, all the three saw a turnaround.

In the December quarter, the momentum seems to have picked up even faster (see chart).

Yugal Joshi, Vice-President at research firm Everest Group, said that independent of the reality that the additions are coming at the back of not-so-encouraging headcount earlier, typically a good sign of demand visibility. In general, it’s a great sign for the industry and probably an earlier-than-expected recovery, he added.

Pandemic effect

“The pandemic has made numerous clients explore offshore-based outsourcing and, with everyone going after cost-cutting, we see this even in the high-end consulting services. This will offer assistance to Indian service providers in general and India-based delivery in particular,” said Joshi.

The pandemic has helped make more up-to-date working models for service providers, in spite of the fact that offshore is an important part. But there are more dimensions to it. Indian service providers should keep verifying their operating and delivery models, and not rest on the prompt large deals they are witnessing as clients want to offload their own resources to the books of Indian system integrators, he said.

Also Apply: Jobs at TCS; Last date to apply 20 January

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