Bengaluru: Cognizant Technology Solutions has declared plans to hire 20,000 new employees this year, defying the trend of extensive layoffs in the computer industry.
This aggressive hiring campaign coincides with the company’s impressive employee utilisation statistics, which showed that the utilisation rate increased from 83 per cent to 85 per cent in the March quarter.
Jatin Dalal, the company’s chief financial officer, admitted that this number will probably decline over the course of the upcoming quarters due to the surge of new hires.
More than 85 per cent of Cognizant’s 336,300 employees were based in India as of the end of the March quarter. The company’s long-term plan to maintain growth and keep expanding its activities, especially in the areas of managed services and fixed-price contracts, includes the decision to hire new personnel.
S Ravi Kumar, the CEO of Cognizant, told analysts in the US that the company has achieved a major milestone with the rise in employee utilisation to 85 per cent. He did, however, stress the significance of developing future-ready talent.
“When you do good fulfilment, you also need to build capacity for the future. This year, we are going to hire a lot more freshers because we want to size a pyramid,” Kumar said. He further elaborated that as the demand for managed services increases, there is a need to balance the company’s workforce structure.
“The fixed price work over the last two years has gone up, so we can start a pyramid. But it also comes equally with the overhead of carrying a higher bench at a lower cost and offshore,” he added. Kumar’s use of the term “pyramid” refers to a strategy that emphasises striking a balance between freshmen and seasoned experts to assist the business scale its capabilities efficiently while controlling expenses.
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