"The company is set to hire 3,000 at trainee level and 2,000 positions will be filled through lateral hiring in the northern region. We plan to hire over 70 per cent candidates from tier II and tier III cities due to quality talent present in these places, which we don't want to miss out on," Thomas Simon, vice-president, HR, TCS said.
The company believes that the knowledge base of these candidates is as strong as their counterparts belonging to bigger cities. However, imparting training in areas of language, soft skills and etiquette is essential to give them a finishing touch, he said. The compensation and rewards for employees across centres would be similar, Simon added.
Eligibility criterion for trainees would be a minimum 60 per cent score in all the degrees attained. As for hiring experienced professionals, the cut-off has been kept at 50 per cent, Simon said.
The hiring would be taken up for positions based in the NCR region apart from Lucknow. While experienced professional hiring would be done for pre-mapped positions, the trainees would be sent to Thiruvananthapuram for initial training.
The company had earlier said it planned to ramp up head count by 32,000 across India this fiscal. TCS has witnessed an attrition rate of 11.5 per cent overall, with 11 per cent attrition rate in the IT services business and 16.7 per cent attrition rate in BPO in the first quarter of current fiscal ended June 30.
"We managed to keep a check in the attrition figures this year," Simon added. The total employee strength of the company was 94,902, from 67 nationalities at the end of first quarter. There was a gross addition of 8,706 employees, of which 2,898 were trainees and 4,795 experienced professionals in India and 1,013 employees in overseas subsidiaries and branches in Q1.
The net addition in the quarter was 5,512 employees. The company is expanding the talent pool beyond engineering students through its 'Ignite' programme aimed at science graduates as well. TCS recently completed a seven-month on-the-job training programme for science graduates.
It also plans to reinforce its new brand image though increased branding activities, newsletters, blogs, campus portal and interacting with training and placement officers and institutional heads of technical institutes through its existing forums 'Sparsh' and 'Sangam'.
