The US-based IT major, Cognizant Technology Solutions is looking to hire about 100,000 lateral hires in 2021, and onboard 30,000 fresh college graduates in the current fiscal to deal with rising attrition.
Additionally, the company is also planning to make 45,000 offers to freshers in India for 2022, said the company’s CEO Brian Humphries on June quarter financial results with analysts.
The hiring plans come in the backdrop of an improved business environment, CEO Brian Humphries said. Last year, the cognizant has hired almost 23,000 Fresh graduates.
Cognizant has reported very high Attrition at 31% for the June ending quarter, of which 29% was voluntary attrition. Cognizant’s attrition metric captures the entire company including trainees and corporates across both IT services and BPO. The company has a total headcount of 301,200.
Most IT services firms have seen an increase in digital-based deals post the pandemic, and that has led to a rise in demand for the right kind of talent and higher voluntary attrition.
Commenting on Attrion CEO Brian Humphries said “We continue to take a series of actions to reduce attrition, including compensation adjustments, job rotations, reskilling and promotions and a host of associated engagement activities. Fortunately, we meaningfully increased our recruiting capacity over the last 6 months as we anticipated the spike in attrition, following the V-shaped demand recovery in the second half of 2020,”
“We now expect to hire approximately 100,000 laterals in 2021 and to train close to 100,000 associates,” Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said.
Rajesh Nambiar, President-Digital Business & Technology and Chairman, India at Cognizant, agreed attrition is higher than it should be.
“We have doubled down on our hiring, we anticipated this whole imbalance and exits in the industry. In addition to investing in our own people, we will also be making record hires to ensure that we will have a very robust talent pipeline. So we are going to be hiring 100,000 lateral hires this year,” Rajesh Nambiar said
“And then we will train roughly about 95,000-100,000 people in new digital capabilities. The third bucket is our graduate hires, 30,000 new graduate hires (have been) onboarded already for the financial year 2021. We have also given offers to 45,000 new graduate hires this year so they will be onboarded next year, in 2022,” Rajesh said.
Cognizant now employs over 3,00,000 for the first time in its history, marking the company’s highest-ever headcount to date, the release said.
