Continuing the trend of mass layoffs at tech companies, the most recent to join the spree after the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, is Indian IT services firm Wipro. The company has sacked 452 entry-level employees after ‘they performed poorly in assessments repeatedly even after training’, said the company in a statement. The termination letter sent to the employees stated that ‘despite adequate training, they have failed to perform’. It also stated that they were liable to pay a fee of Rs 75,000 in order to compensate for the amount Wipro spent on training them. However, the company, in the same mail, waived off the fee. “We wish to inform you that training cost of Rs 75,000 which you are liable to pay, will be waived off,” the letter noted.
FinancialExpress.com reached out to Wipro on its next move, to which the company said that the company is continuously hiring employees for various roles and these layoffs were the result of the normal procedure which entails a proficiency test of employees after training them. Commenting on the layoff, the company said, “At Wipro, we take pride in holding ourselves to the highest standards. In line with the standards, we aim to set for ourselves, we expect every entry-level employee to have a certain level of proficiency in their designated area of work.”
Wipro said that its performance evaluation process encompasses a series of actions including mentoring of employees, retraining them and in some cases, laying them off in case of unsatisfactory performance. Wipro has a presence in 66 countries. The IT firm’s total employee count in 2022 was 240,000 which was a 20 per cent increase from 200,000 employees in 2021 which had, again, risen by 14.29 per cent as compared to 2020 numbers.
Earlier this month, Wipro reported 2.8 per cent year-on-year rise in consolidated net profit for the December quarter to Rs 3,053 crore. Consolidated revenue for the quarter increased 14.3 per cent YoY to Rs 23,229 crore. The first three weeks of January 2023 have already witnessed layoffs of 55,970 employees across 173 companies around the world, according to Layoffs.fyi. This is 35 per cent of the total layoffs witnessed in 2022.