India's second largest IT services company Infosys on Thursday said the company is unlikely to be hiring any freshers this year.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said the company is carrying inefficiencies in its employee pyramid and has enough room to tighten utilization from the current 81.8%. He further said that the company hopes to increase its utilization by 84-85%.
“At the moment we are not going to the campus, we will look at the future predictions and act accordingly,” said CFO Nilanjan Roy. When asked if the company will go to campuses at all this year, he clarified that it was unlikely that the company will go to campuses this year for hiring.
“We have a head reduction of 7,000 but our utilization only went up by 70 basis points so we still have enough room for utilization going ahead,” he added.
The company stated that over 50,000 of its recent fresh hires have been benched waiting to be trained and ready to enter the workforce since last year.
This is the sixth consecutive quarter that Infosys has been seeing a decline in hiring and the second quarter in a row when its total workforce strength has slipped.
Infosys headcount has declined by 6,940 employees for the June quarter compared to Q4FY23. IT companies Wipro and HCLTech also saw a decline in headcounts. The company’s total employees as of June 30, 2023, stood at 3,36,294 compared to 3,43,234 in the March quarter.
Separately, the company added that the wage hikes will be rolled out on 1st november.
The company’s attrition for the quarter stood at 17.3% from 20.9% in the previous quarter. It was at 28.4% in the year-ago period.
As far as hiring is concerned, the company did not outline the hiring target for FY24 and said it will depend on changes in terms of the demand environment and also in terms of the attrition numbers that they are seeing.
For the quarter ended September, the IT major reported a 3.1 per cent year-on-year rise in net profit to Rs 6,215 crore for the September 2023 quarter. The earnings (before minority interest) of the Bengaluru-based company stood at Rs 6,026 crore in the year-ago period.
The company - which competes in the IT services market with TCS, Wipro, HCL Technologies and others - saw its revenue rising 6.7 per cent to Rs 38,994 crore for the just-ended September quarter.