IT bellwether Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been recording a fall in attrition from the previous sequential quarters, with it reaching a comfortable level of 12.5% in the fourth quarter. Going forward, the Tata Group company expects attrition to further fall by 30-50 basis points. The firm intends to hire 40,000 freshers this year too, its executive vice president and chief human resources officer Milind Lakkad told FE Rajesh Kurup in an interview. The IT firm, as part of its “co-strategy”, has been hiring locals in the US, with it onboarding 20,000 locals since the pandemic and 1,100 in Q4 alone, he said. Excerpts:
TCS’ attrition has been falling and has come down to 12.5% in Q4, compared with 13.3% in Q3 and 14.9% in Q2. What would be a comfortable level for you?
Our comfort level is in the 11-13% range. Attrition had gone up because of certain circumstances, and now it is coming back to normal. From the job market standpoint, things are now normal and that is why attrition has come down. Based on our current assessment, we expect it to come down further by 30-50 basis points.
How many freshers are you planning to hire from campuses in FY25?
We have enrolled more than 10,000 offers already, we have gone to priority colleges and done that. We have launched the National Qualifier Test, which will be scheduled shortly and we expect big numbers to come from there also. We plan to hire 40,000 (employees) but where we will end up, we will know only in the next two months.
Your net headcount declined for the first time in 19 years, with FY24 ending with 601,546 employees? Why?
We had hired a lot in FY22 and FY23. Onboarding them, training them, making them productive — all of that takes time. Further, we are driving productivity and utilisation within the company, both these factors eventually ended up with that headcount.
On the salary hikes proposed to be given from April this year?
Top performers will get double digits, anywhere in the range of 10-15%, while the average will be 11%. Most people will get 4.5-7%.
On H-1B visas, are you comfortable with the allocations? Separately, a group of US techies have filed a class action suit alleging TCS of firing them on short notice and that their roles were given to Indians on H-1B visas?
We don’t generally reveal H-1B visa allocation numbers. We got the same number of visas as every year. On the suit, I cannot comment as the matter is sub-judice. At the time of pandemic, we obviously could not send people from here and we ended up hiring a lot of contractors in the US. The number of locals also went up significantly at that time. So those were temporary workers and they will go away at some point in time. In the US alone, we had hired 20,000 locals since the pandemic and 1,100 in Q4. We have been hiring locals, which is part of our co-strategy.
Would you also be looking at hiring gig workers?
The overall gig aspect will be redefined in the context of AI. We are assessing this as we go along.
You are also providing a lot of in-house training and upskilling to match technologies such as AI and Gen-AI among others?
Everyone in TCS should have basic foundational skills on AI and Gen-AI, and right now, we have got close to 300,000 people trained so far. We are also building the next level of expertise and building a pyramid of that, so that everybody has foundational skills and there are a few experts at different levels. That is what we are doing right now.