IT Calling: Infosys to announce a good news for campus aspirants

IT Calling: Infosys to announce a good news for campus aspirants

Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on Friday said the company is working on new technologies like automation and artificial intelligence to transform India’s second largest outsourcer in to a next generation services company. Infosys’ new strategy is seen to boost the company’s growth and margins, but for prospective employees, it sends mixed signals.

Nasscom considers Increasing automation to eat up low-end jobs, since the IT industry added only 13,000 employees for every billion dollar of revenue as compared to 26,500 employees in fiscal year 2012-13. The higher productivity was partly on account of automation and partly because of a break from traditional Time and Material billing model (billing on a per-person, per-hour basis) to fixed-price proportions (revenue independent of employee addition) that disrupted hiring and the trend is likely to continue, analysts say. Dr Sikka said the artificial intelligence domain would involve “some very high paying, high skill jobs” within Infosys. However, these jobs are unlikely to materialise in the near future as the new technologies may take years to implement. “We hire close to 10,000 people in the year and if we hire a couple of hundred data scientists and so forth, it doesn’t really change the overall picture that much, even though it is an incredibly strategic area for us,” Dr Sikka said.

Companies like Infosys, which have fallen behind industry in terms of growth, are increasingly looking for MBAs to aggressively drive sales. Last month, Mr Rajiv Bansal (CFO at Infosys) said the company will increase its sales and marketing spends to drive higher growth. On Friday, Sandeep Mahindroo of Infosys said, “What we’ve been doing is inducting talent from MBA universities at the lower levels and at the senior levels, also going through design thinking training on the lines of some of our new solutions.”

The greatest part to be focussed apart from all this is that,on Friday, Dr Sikka announced 100 per cent bonus for employees, a first for Infosys in 16 quarters. The company also promoted around 12,000 employees between July and September, the highest in any single quarter in its history, CFO Bansal said. Chief operating officer UB Pravin Rao said attrition would come down in the next couple of quarters to 13-15 per cent, which is the industry average. This will further weigh on hiring.

Facts discolose that in Q2, Infosys added a total of 14,255, of which 4,774 were lateral hires, Angel Broking says. But after taking into account the number of employees who left the company, the net addition of employees during the quarter stood at 4,127.

Well, IT graduates do not feel like giving it a second thought to work in this software giant next fiscal for sure!

-Meesha Sharma