Engineering graduates seek HCL appointment letters

HCL Technologies may claim to place “Employees first, customers second”, but a large number of the company’s new recruits beg to differ. For, it has been a long and frustrating wait for their appointment letters to reach the 5,000 engineering graduates who had been given a letter of intent.

The graduates from Bangalore, Chennai, Noida, Hyderabad and Pune, who passed out of their courses in 2012, were hired through campus placements in September 2011.

The letters of intent said that they could join the company in a few months by when they expected their appointment orders. Instead, they were suddenly, almost a year later in September 2012, asked to write a Front Runner Programme (FRP) test.

“They said that we will have to score more than 65 per cent, or else will be shifted to a different vertical. Only 20 per cent (around 1,300 graduates) of those who wrote the FRP test passed when the results were finally announced a month later; they were supposed to be announced within three days. When we sought to know our scores, they said they were confidential,” said one of the graduates, requesting anonymity.

“We were hired as software engineers, but were told we could be accommodated in the infrastructure or outsourcing verticals. When we wrote the test, we were assured that it was only for sequencing, not filtering out the candidates,” said another graduate.

Those who “failed” the first FRP were told that another test will be held on January 6 this year, but the test was cancelled on January 1. But even those who passed the first FRP have not received communication about their joining dates.

“We have told them that we are ready to train for three extra months (in addition to the three-month training period) and work for lesser than what was offered to us. But every time we contact the company, we are not given clear answers. All that they say is we will be taken on-board based on business requirement. For a company that boasts of such quarterly results, why is there such a delay?” a graduate asked.

What is irking them further is that the company has started hiring yet another batch of freshers from engineering colleges. “All that the college placement cells care for is to meet the 100 per cent placement target. When we approached our placement officer, we were asked to accept the job in the other verticals,” lamented an alumnus of a popular college. The graduates will now protest against this inordinate delay by HCL Technologies on Monday in front of their corporate office. The company was unavailable for comments.