‘HCL Tech plans to more freshers than lateral hires’
HCL Technologies plans to increase the share of freshers in its annual hiring numbers to 70% over the coming years as it looks to focus on onboarding people with new-age skills, a senior company official said.
In 2020-21, 40% of the people hired by the company were freshers and 60% lateral hires.
“We want to change this in the next couple of years. We really want to go to 70% freshers and 30% lateral hire,” the company’s chief human resources officer Apparao V.V. said.
“The reason is that most of the skills that are required in the projects that we are winning and executing are new-age skills,” he added.
These are skills related to cybersecurity, digitalisation, IoT and Cloud, he said.
HCL Technologies plans to hire 20,000 freshers globally this year.
In 2020-21, this number stood at about 14,500 freshers.
“The entire technology landscape has changed. We are taking a two-pronged approach… We are training and upskilling our people in the organization and parallelly getting fresh graduates and training them in what we need,” Mr. Apparao said.
“They are very flexible. They don’t have any unlearning to do. So anything you give, they learn much faster,” he added.
He added that the company was constantly identifying the skills needed depending on the business that is coming, and encouraging employees to train themselves.
Separately, president and CEO C. Vijayakumar said that HCL Technologies did not expect any significant impact due to the second wave of the pandemic. “Whatever impact we saw was in the initial first wave of the pandemic. At this point, we don’t see any significant impact from a client market perspective, but the situation in India definitely is something which is very concerning and we’re trying to do everything to help our employees. We are watching it carefully and how to manage it.. it’s something which we are planning on a daily basis,” he said.
Mr. Vijayakumar added that the company also plans to take its offerings into new markets such as Germany, France, Canada, Australia and Japan, while growing footprint in geographies like Mexico, Brazil and Spain.
Asked about the company’s acquisition strategy, he said, “Right now there is so much demand that we are looking at how to grow organically… that is a higher priority at this time.”
“But there could be areas, right opportunities, especially in some new countries where we want to open up, and some of the new capabilities that we want to build… we will open to do that,” he added.
He said the company spends about $200 million annually on R&D as there are a lot of products modernized and unveiled in newer versions by HCL Tech.