The tech industry was on a major hiring spree when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak in 2020. Then, towards the end of 2022, IT giants began laying off people as they realised the need for cost-cutting.
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The mass-scale layoffs continued till this year and companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Twitter and Microsoft, among others, have given the pink slip to thousands of employees. While some IT giants are firing people, others are looking at other ways to reduce costs.
IT company Infosys said on Thursday that it will not be hiring freshers from campuses this year. The reason behind this is that the company already has enough freshers whom they need to train. Here is the full story, in five points:
1. According to a report in PTI, Infosys has said that it won’t be hiring fresh talent from campuses this year. This is because it still has a “significant fresher bench” and there is a decline in demand in key markets like the US. In a press conference on Thursday, Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh said that the company is carrying “inefficiencies in its employee pyramid and has enough room to tighten utilisation to 84-85 per cent.”
2. CFO Nilanjan Roy, said during the Q2 briefing that many freshers are being trained on Gen AI, and that the company has no plans of hiring more freshers yet.
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“Last year, we hired 50,000 freshers and hired ahead of demand…we still have a significant fresher bench… we are, of course, training them on Gen AI…but we still have a way to go on utilisation, and at the moment are not going to campuses as yet…we will monitor this every quarter looking at our future projections,” he said.
3. The company also added that it will be honouring all the offers that have already been made, and will hire people as projects come up. Roy was also asked if the company doesn’t plan on going to campuses for hiring at all. He said, “As we see it, I don’t think it is likely that this year, we are going to be going, but we will watch it every quarter.”
4. Infosys was making headlines in February this year for firing 600 freshers after they failed to clear an internal test. “I started working at Infosys in August last year and I was given training for SAP ABAP stream. Out of 150 in my team, only 60 people passed the FA exam. Rest all of us were terminated two weeks ago. From the previous batch (freshers who were onboarded in July 2022), nearly 85 freshers were terminated out of 150 after failing the test,” a fresher employee at Infosys told Business Today at the time. The person was reportedly hired by the company in August 2022. Moreover, other impacted employees also said that failing the internal test didn’t result in termination for freshers who joined before July 2022.
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5. In May, the company had reportedly slashed the average variable pay of its employees by 40 per cent for the quarter that ended on March 2023.
