Infosys still on a recruitment spree

BANGALORE: The hiring spree at Infosys Technologies, which recently created a record for highest recruitments in a single day, continues unabated. The company, which surprised markets recently with better-than-expected financial results for the first quarter, has said it would recruit a minimum of 7,000 employees in the second half.

Keeping in line with its guidance of hiring 25,000 people in FY07, Infosys made a gross addition of 8,097 employees during the first quarter. It has also announced a hike in salaries for the freshers from the next fiscal.

The software behemoth said it would add 10,000 in the last two quarters of the current fiscal. During the first quarter, while the lateral addition stood at 2,140 employees, it added 4,200 freshers. This is excluding the employee addition at its BPO subsidiary Progeon.

However, attrition rate during the first quarter was 11.9% as against 11.2% in the sequential quarter of the previous fiscal. During an analyst call in Bangalore, Infosys COO S Gopalakrishnan said, “Clients are increasing their technology spending and we are also increasing our hiring which also includes our sales team.”

Infosys, which had utilisation rate of 76.1% during the first quarter, is expecting this to go up in the coming months. The IT majors in the country have announced major hiring plans which include TCS planning to hire 30,000 people while Satyam has said it would hire as many as 20,000.

Infosys which has got a majority of employees in the fresher category will be raising the salaries for this category by 12.5% in FY08. Mohandas Pai said out of the 8,000 offers it has made, it had a yield of 70-75%.

During the quarter, Progeon had an 1,700 additional members taking its total number to over 8,000. Amitabh Chaudhary, CEO, Progeon, said its margins had come down in Q1 due to increase in salaries, stock compensation charge and negative impact of rupee depreciation.