Major IT Companies Reduce Employee Strength

The $156-billion Indian IT industry, often called the biggest job creator in the organized sector, is seeing a tectonic shift in recruitment.

For the first six months of the fiscal, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra have all seen their employee strength decline -quite sharply in Cognizant's case (by over 5,000). TCS and HCL Technologies are the only exceptions among India's top six IT companies, but even TCS' addition is a fraction of what it did in the first six months of the previous fiscal.

The headcount of all of the six companies put together dropped by 4,157 in the first six months of this fiscal, compared to an increase of almost 60,000 in the same period last year.

Several factors are at work. Automation is making thousands of entry-level jobs redundant. Companies are improving their employee-utilization levels and keeping fewer people on the bench. In the traditional spaces of application development & maintenance and infrastructure maintenance, growth is down. And while companies are looking to hire people with specialized skill sets in newer areas such as data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things, the growth rate in these spaces and the nature of the business do not necessitate large-scale hiring.