Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) witnessed net addition of 821 employees in the January to March 2023 quarter as against the previous quarter when it saw a net drop of nearly 2,200 employees, the company's financial results for Q4 released on April 12 show. This takes TCS’ workforce to 614,795 as on March 31, 2023, a net addition of 22,600 for the fiscal.
Outgoing TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinath said the IT bellwether has been "disciplined" in its headcount addition as hiring saw only a small uptick in the fourth quarter.
The tech giant saw attrition during the fourth quarter ease to 20.1 percent against 21.3% in the last quarter and expect it to further come down to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of FY24.
The company said that in quarterly annualized terms, attrition has dropped significantly 4.2 percent in Q4 and within a short span of six months quarterly annualised attrition has fallen more than 10 percent versus the peak in Q2FY23.
Reflecting on the weaker than expected results, Samir Seksaria, Chief Financial Officer, said, client sentiment turned increasingly negative in February and margin reflected on revenue and margins. He explained that discretionary spend was impacted while costs remained sticky and that on-site manpower cost increase negated benefits of efficiency on margin.
Freshers' hiring at TCS
TCS Chief HR Officer Milind Lakkad, in a statement, said, the tech behemoth is honouring all job offers, and has added 22,600 employees on a net basis in FY 23. During the year, it onboarded over 44,000 freshers and its highest-ever number of experienced professionals, he said.
"We also doubled down on organic talent development, obtaining over 53K cloud certifications during the year, bringing the total to over 110K employees certified on hyperscaler platforms. This places us among the top 2 partners for the largest cloud providers,” Lakkad added.
TCS' integration with Artificial Intelligence tools
When asked about how TCS is integrating AI tools like ChatGPT into its operations, N Ganapathy Subramaniam, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director, said innovation is surpassing productivity and there's huge amount of focus on cloud data, machine learning in our deal wins.
“No big budget cuts, but spend wisely is the sentiment from clients," he told CNBC-TV18, and added that the company has started integrating generative AI in its offerings.
