Infosys steps up hiring, but visits fewer campuses

The focus has been on top-tier institutions and those that have a “deeper engagement” with the company

IT services major Infosys has made over 16,300 campus offers in 2013-14, up from less than 5,000 last year. Though the overall campus hires figure has gone up, the number of campuses visited has reduced drastically by over half.

These figures will not only bring cheer to fresh engineering graduates and final year students but also indicate that better times are here for the bellwether, which had deferred campus offers made in 2013 and significantly reduced its campus intakes by at least two-thirds last year.

In an interaction with this correspondent, Srikantan Moorthy, Senior Vice-President and Group Head of Human Resource Development at Infosys, said that the company had achieved its recruitment target from around 250 campuses, compared to over 600 institutions every year.

The focus had been on top-tier institutions and those that had a “deeper engagement” with the company, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the standards of the evaluation process had only increased, and more company leaders were part of the process now. This time the company “looks forward to on-boarding them as soon as they complete their education.” Entry-level salaries of campus hires remained unchanged, he added.

Attrition

When quizzed on attrition, an area where the company has, in recent quarters, been ahead of its peers, Mr. Moorthy remained non-committal on any impending exits or downsizing at the company. Last quarter, attrition at Infosys rose to about 18 per cent — well ahead of the industry average — with the company seeing not just high-profile exits among the top management but also attrition among mid- and senior level management.

Mr. Moorthy said that he did not think these exits had had an impact on employee morale as it wasn’t a “performance crackdown”, but a continuous performance-linked evaluation process.

NRN effect on HR

Since the return of company founder N.R. Narayana Murthy to an executive role in July last, the company has stepped up its employee engagement activities across channels. Mr. Moorthy pointed out that the newly-introduced JAM sessions (where employees meet top execs over lunch) and more frequent communication over multiple channels — blogs, Infy TV and radio and through ‘townhall’ talks — had been effective in keeping employees informed of the happening at the company. “As an employee, you want leaders to talk to you and you want to know what is happening. Mr. Narayana Murthy recognised this, ” he said.

Other HR initiatives undertaken by the company to quell attrition included introducing a “fast track” for employees who were experts in technical areas, so that irrespective of their overall experience, employees would still have the opportunity to grow into senior roles within the organisation, he said.