TCS to hire campus placements all year

The campus placements process usually starts in July-August, but is likely to start earlier this year.
Romita Majumdar reports.

Tata Consultancy Services, the country's top employer in the private sector, will be changing its national qualifier testing for campus placements to a year-round process.

In 2018, offers were made to 30,000 freshers through its TCS National Qualifier Test (TQNT).

Though high, this was down from those in 2016 and 2015, at 35,000 and 40,000, respectively.

"The process remains the same this year and we will apply the key principles of democratising talent as we go forward," says Milind Lakkad, its newly appointed global head for human resources.

"We are going to make the test an ongoing thing...not a once in a year event but something people can take around the year," he adds.

The basic process of online testing, followed by personal interview rounds, would remain the same.

The campus placements process usually starts in July-August, but is likely to start earlier this year, as many other companies want to avoid losing talent to TCS by coming earlier than usual.

Last year, by October, 270,000 candidates from 1,800-odd engineering colleges (compared to about 300 partner institutes in the past) across the country appeared for the test.

Of this, 50,000 were shortlisted for interviews.

TCS added 12,356 employees in the first quarter of 2019-2020 on a net basis (net of employee attrition), the highest such in a quarter over the past five years.

On the back of strong demand, it says it issued joining letters to over 30,000 fresh graduates, of which 40% came on board in the quarter; the others will join in this (July-September) quarter.

The total headcount is 436,641; the attrition rate is 11.5%.

The management said it would wait and see what the joining ratio was of the 30,000 offers it had made.

"We believe that our ability to absorb a much larger trainee inflow is significantly enhanced because of our shift from physical training facilities to digitised training, and being able to provide this training as a series of nano courses, so that it can be integrated with people through their work cycle," says TCS CEO and Managing Director Rajesh Gopinathan.

Once the planned change is in place, in combination with the TNQT infrastructure, the company said it would be able to move even fresher hiring into an on-demand basis.

"So, it is part of a larger transformation we are going through and we are really putting it to test by accelerating the trainee on-boarding."

The company also announced a collaboration of TCS iON with the All India Council for Technical Education, the country's official regulatory body in this area, to provide a curated digital learning course for career skills.