Infosys to make 13,000 campus offers next year

Infosys Technologies, India's second largest information technology services company, which is an early bird on campuses this year, says it will offer jobs to 13,000 freshers for 2010-11.

This is despite the fact that the number of engineering colleges it visits every year for campus recruitment is expected to drop by half as compared with 2007.

The company says it has been prompted to do so since the conversion rate (the number of people who get offers and finally join the company) in the last two years has improved dramatically.

Till 2008, according to Infosys' Senior VP and Group Head for HR Nandita Gurjar, the company used to visit 1,050 engineering colleges for campus recruitments. The number dropped to 700 in 2008. The figure is again expected to fall to 500 or 550 this year, as the company has already started going for campus interviews.

"In 2008, when we made the campus offers, the conversion dramatically improved and this is the reason why we did not require to go to so many colleges. Even now, though we plan to visit 700 colleges, we are expecting to get the required numbers from 500 or 550 colleges," Gurjar told Business Standard.

The typical conversion rate in case of campus recruitment is about 70 percent, which has now gone up to 73 percent, she said. Earlier, Infosys board member and head of HR T V Mohandas Pai had said the company might hire 20,000 people at the gross level for the financial year starting April 1, 2010.

Going by this, Infosys may have to hire 7,000 laterals (people with experience) for 2010-11.

Meanwhile, Infosys has initiated the process to fill up the post of chief executive officer of its BPO division, with the decision of erstwhile CEO Amitabh Chaudhry to quit. Gurjar said there were five contenders for the post and all of them were from within the company.