TCS, Wipro, Infosys in a hiring mode but look for seasoned hotshots

Date: 04-Jan-2010

KOLKATA: The new year is going to bring a lot of cheer for the country’s seasoned IT professionals. Leading IT companies like Tata Consultancy

Services (TCS), Wipro, Infosys, Mahindra Satyam and Cognizant have once again started recruitment in the middle and senior level, which were largely on hold since the recession.

The companies are now undertaking such senior-level hiring to bid for big-ticket IT deals which are now opening up in the West. It is usually from January onwards that clients prepare their IT budgets and invite bids. Headhunters estimate that some 3,000 senior professionals have been hired by the Indian IT sector in the October-December 2009 quarter.

Mahindra Satyam, for instance, has roped in a battery of senior professionals to rebuild the company and bid for large deals. It has roped in Vijay Anand Vaderu from Wipro to head strategy, Sudhir Nair from Infosys to drive infrastructure management division, Bobby Gupta from IBM to head sales in Australia and Ram Ramchandran from HCL to head Asean region. A couple of senior people will soon join the US operations.

Patni Computer Systems has recently appointed Naresh L Lakhanpal from Deloitte & Touche to head its American operations, V Mathivanan from Singapore Network Services as president of its Asia-Pacific operations, and Vijay Mehra, who was the global CIO at Essar Group, as executive VP.

“The signs are encouraging since October last year, after more than three quarters of complete freeze in lateral hiring by the IT firms,” says leading headhunter Ma Foi CEO E Balaji.

Infosys is also believed to be reviewing candidates to head its BPO operations and an announcement is likely by mid-January , Headhunters said.

This comes after its erstwhile CEO for BPO Amitabh Chaudhry quit in November last year. However, Infosys CEO & MD S Gopalakrishnan refused to comment due to statutory silent period norms before the quarterly results.

Typically, the average cost-to-company (CTC) for lateral recruits starts at Rs 15 lakh per annum in the IT sector. Despite such high talent acquisition cost, the companies are not shying away from such recruitment.

“Nowadays, not even a single day goes without me interviewing two three senior professionals for possible recruitment,” says Mahindra Satyam president (global operations) Atul Kunwar. “Since several large value deals are going to happen in the new year, it is now a necessity to augment our sales team, domain expertise and acquire niche skills. Hence, such senior level recruitment is happening across geographies.”

Pradeep Bahirwani, vice president (talent acquisition), Wipro, said the company is aggressively looking at senior professionals who have domain or client management experience and leadership experience. “Even though we have a cautious hiring strategy, recruitment of such senior people is a key focus area. Such hiring has also taken place in the US and EU,” he said.

TCS, too, is expanding its lateral hiring quarter-on-quarter and will further grow it in the days to come, says global head (HR) Ajoyendra Mukherjee . Some firms like Cognizant have gone for lateral hiring during the slowdown as way to rope in quality talent.

“The pace of decision making in client organisations has accelerated. There is relative stability, if not recovery, in clients’ businesses. This has helped accelerate the sign-off and launch of a number of projects. As a result, hiring is aggressively picking up again,” says Sriram Rajagopal, AVP (HR), Cognizant. The company has hired such people in consulting, IT infrastructure services and BPO businesses.

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