Wipro CEO TK Kurien said the IT services company will maintain last year’s hiring growth. On the other hand, its rival TCS said it will increase hiring by 5,000 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014 to 55,000 resources.
The hiring of Wipro does not reflect its growth plans. Wipro BPO business revenue grew 4.1 percent sequentially.
Wipro CEO, in a call with select analysts last week, said: “We see ADM business long-term going back to the company growth rates. We don’t see that kind of drag in the company growth rates, like too much. So to that extent, we would see that turn around in the next couple of quarters. ADM growth is better than company growth by 1 percent.”
TCS last week said it is looking at hiring 55,000 resources in FY 2014 against the earlier target of 50,000. The IT outsourcing company said it continued to hire to support business growth. In the third quarter of 2013-14, the total gross addition of employees was 14,663 (net addition of 5,463 employees) taking the total employee strength to 290,713.
Wipro’s main challenge is the low growth in resource numbers.
Manish Hemrajani – Oppenheimer & Co. Research Division, says Wipro headcount levels were down sequentially in the third quarter of fiscal 2014.
The IT services industry has not seen this in the last 8 quarters or so. The other major challenge is the attrition range of 13 percent to 15 percent.
Kurien says the company is comfortable with the current level of attrition.
“We are fairly comfortable with the current headcount to meet future demand. Our hiring for last year continues on plan. We haven’t changed a single number as far as hiring is concerned. We are definitely hiring, we continue to hire exactly as we planned. This year, too, we don’t expect to see any changes on hiring factors,” Kurien said.
Wipro CEO says long-term secular hiring is more important than short-term is. “So we will continue to hire at the same levels that we hired last year. We don’t expect a big change there, and we have communicated the date to all at high terms, and we expect it to have remained at those days,” said Kurien.
“As far as the absolute headcount is concerned, the key is that for us it’s important that as we drive productivity, the mix of the workforce has changed. We need more people in front of the customer, more architectural skills, more people with more integrated ability,” he added.
The number of people acquired in the back, who regular coding, is not going at the same level as we have seen in the past.
“There is a shift in workforce. The traditional pyramid that we see, especially with change in the business product, is moving at to some kind of a — it’s more like an hourglass kind of thing. It’s heavier at the top,” Wipro CEO said.
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
