While the global slowdown may have forced several Indian IT firms to rationalise costs and freeze their hiring, Infosys expects to exceed its hiring target before the end of financial year 2007-08

Infosys had earlier said it had met its target of hiring  25,000 people for the current fiscal year ending March 2009.

However, while declaring the third quarter results on Tuesday,  Infosys said that it will exceed its projected hiring of 25,000 people by hiring another 2,000 people.

Infosys is still hiring for specific skills, even as it said its overall HR targets have been met. So far it has It has hired 17,299 employees besides making around 20,000 campus offers.

The HRD director Mohandas Pai said, ''We will honour all our campus offers for freshers,'' and said the IT firm had sent letters to the fresh recruits confirming their date of joining.

Employee utilisation, excluding trainees, dropped to 74.5 per cent during the quarter, down 2.2 percentage points compared to a year ago.

''Utilisation could come down as the volume growth comes down but what we are trying to do is we are building model for long terms. In our business, one just cannot go to the market and hire people. He has to hire, train and keep them ready,'' said Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO Infosys.

The employee strength of Infosys Technologies increased by 2,772 employees in October-December 2008 over June-September 2008, and by over 14,477 employees in the third quarter 2008-09 over the year-ago period.

During the quarter ended December 31, 2008, Infosys and its subsidiaries hired 5,997 employees, while the net addition was 2,772.

In the second quarter Infosys had hired approximately 6000 employees most of them being trainees. Infosys has also extended the training period for freshers from 16 weeks to 24 weeks so that the employees learn an additional language and become much more versatile.
As on December 31, 2008, Infosys and its subsidiaries had 1,03,078 employees.

Infosys Technologies on Tuesday said the number of employees at its business process outsourcing subsidiary, Infosys BPO, fell by as much as 386 in the third quarter of this financial year.

For the third quarter ended December 31, 2008, the employee strength of Infosys BPO stood at 16,941, while in the previous quarter the company had 17,327 employees.

Thus, quarter-on-quarter Infosys BPO has recorded an headcount loss of 386 employees or 2.27 per cent.
However, on a year-on-year basis there has been a rise of 1,546 employees.

 Speaking about hiring trends in the industry, Pai said tolerance for non-performers was non-existent today. In (the earlier) boom time, non-performers were accepted by the industry as there was a shortage of manpower.