IT players’ shift in hiring strategies

Competition from product companies, change in the customer’s technological requirements and evolving technology landscape are forcing IT players to change their hiring strategies.

Firms like IBM, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant that visit Indian engineering campuses for mass recruitment are also focused on hiring engineers with niche skill sets and are paying differential salaries that are double of normal entry-level salaries. However, these hirings are restricted to tier-I colleges and form just about 1-2% of the overall recruitment the companies do.

Take for instance Mumbai’s VJTI (Veermata Jijabai technological Institute). The engineering institute this year has India’s largest IT services provider TCS coming to hire a handful of students under the niche segment and paid a salary package of Rs 6 lakh — almost double that of the entry level salary that the company gives for engineers hired in bulk numbers.

“Last year we had IBM doing the same thing, this year TCS picked up 6-7 students. Wipro took around 34 students in this segment and did not participate at all in the mass recruitment category. The salary package starts from Rs 6 lakh onwards,” said the professor in-charge for training & placement at VJTI.

The scene is same at most of the tier-I engineering campuses, though the number of hires in the specialised category from engineering colleges are still in either single digit or initial double digit segment, the need to get access to good engineering talent has begun.

For FY17, TCS has hired around 200 engineers in this segment from over 55 universities in India. To be able to get access to good engineering talent TCS also conducts hackathon’s and other programmes through its Campus Commune platform.

Down South, universities saw this trend starting a year or two back. “When services companies have a similar profile that a product company has then they have to match salary. Though services companies are hiring for niche skills, they are not yet consistent with the hiring numbers of the frequency,” said Prof. Ganapathy, dean placement, SRM University.

“There has always been categorisation of colleges when it comes to fresher hiring for niche practices such as product engineering services and industry verticals such as telecom, oil etc,” said Subrahmanyam P, Senior Vice President and Chief of Global Delivery Enablement, Wipro.

Subrahmanyam also explains that colleges are categorised for technical hiring into Star colleges, Turbo colleges and rest of 100 engineering colleges. “The mix of hiring from these colleges keeps varying, depending upon the business demand and availability of candidates,” he said.

Prof Rahul Dahatonde, training and placement officer at Sardar Patel College of Engineering also said: “These numbers are still very small. Most of them are doing this so that they can tell their clients that they have access to talent from tier-I colleges and in the required skill segment.”

Human resources experts feel that with increased automation the number of entry level jobs will come down and companies will focus on hiring more niche skills. Moreover, the trend of hiring niche skill is limited to top rung technology institutes.

“Research says that 30 per cent of IT jobs will be redundant in coming years. Add to this campus hiring has come down, and entry level salaries have remained stagnant. But there are companies who are willing to pay more salaries if the candidate have skills in the SMAC segment,” said Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO & founder, The Head hunters.

Lakshmikanth also added that the reason for IT firms to hire from top rung colleges is also because of the fact that they have a more rigorous entrance exam.