TCS to kickstart lateral hiring and bring back 5% of its employees to offices

• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) plans to open up lateral hiring again which had been temporarily suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• It also plans to bring back 5% of its employees to offices by the end of the month.
• In the last quarter, TCS chief human resources officer claims that over 4,500 positions were filled as a result of learning intensity increasing by 25%.

India’s largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), is planning to open up lateral hiring again and things begin to return to normal after the coronavirus pandemic affected its operations worldwide. It also plans to bring back employees into offices to up to 5%.


TCS claims that its plans to restart lateral hiring are going to come into picture again due to increased demand. “We have decided to open up on the lateral hiring side and have started onboarding new associates into the TCS ecosystem,” said CEO Rajesh Gopinathan.

Since they weren’t hiring, TCS chief human resources officer Milind Lakkad says that the company has been filling in positions using ‘strategic talent development’. “Our learning intensity has gone up by nearly 25%,” he said. As a result, over 4,500 positions in the company were filled even though there was no junior recruitment happening over the last quarter.

Coming back to work
“We are still very conservative in bringing people back to work. Our strategy varies according to the COVID situation in each country, in each city,” said TCS chief human resources officer Milind Lakkad. Currently only has 1% of TCS employees are in offices across the globe.


The company says it will employ a campus-specific approach to bring employees back into the office in line with their 25/25 vision for 2025, which entail only 25% of employees in offices spending 25% of their time to deliver 100% productivity.

"The location-independent way of working is gaining traction. Our customers are quite comfortable integrating the remote workforce, using new collaborative technologies to get work done,” said TCS COO N. Ganapathy Subramaniam during the first-quarter earnings call.

“It was extremely important for us to connect with fresher recruits during this period,” explained Lakkad since onboarding has been delayed due to delays in academic terms. TCS plans to honour all existing offers.

Gopinathan believes that the road to recovery for TCS will be better than it was after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). According to him, the recovery trajectory was one step ahead this time around due to early response and better coordination.

SEE ALSO:
TCS revenue dips by 6.3% ⁠— CEO says nearly all verticals were hit by COVID-19 crisis

From TCS and Infosys to Microsoft and Kissflow ⁠— this is what top execs have to say about productivity in remote working

TCS and Infosys to face least impact — Indian IT companies likely to report sharp decline in revenue during first quarter