Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) visited over 370 Indian engineering colleges in the last few months?to recruit 25,000 trainees ? of the?55,000 people it plans to hire in FY15 ?who will be inducted from June 1. Executive vice-president, global head, human resources, Ajoyendra Mukherjee, discusses hiring plans with FE’s?Nitin Shrivastava and Rhik Kundu. Excerpts:
TCS had 3,00,464 employees at the end of fiscal 2014. How do you keep such a massive workforce motivated?
TCS has been doing well. We try to keep our workforce motivated with the kind of work we do, by creating a good work culture and by compensating well. Our basic ideology, when it comes to hiring people, is to hire those who would stay with us for life. We even rotate people from one engagement to another, from country to country, and technology to technology. We conduct activities to take care of stress levels.
On a last 12-month basis, your attrition rate stood at 11.3 %, one of the lowest in the industry.
We have multiple initiatives to retain staff. People start leaving the organization when they get bored. The main challenge for us is to culturally integrate our workforce together. At present, we are seeing higher attrition level abroad than in India as the company has tremendous brand value in India. We are working on improving this.
At a time when Indian IT players are ramping up their presence in the US, what are your overseas hiring plans? Are you mostly opting for lateral hires (client-facing role) abroad?
We have visited universities in the US for recruitment. ?We expect about 250 students will join us as trainees in the coming months. However, this time we will make more lateral hiring abroad. Overseas hiring this year will be similar to that of FY14.
