Infosys begins campus hunt for 13,000 recruits; seeks new BPO head

Infosys Technologies Ltd, the country's second largest software exporter by volumes, is planning to make 13,000 on-campus offers to fresh engineering graduates who are expected to join during the course of fiscal 2011, even as the company has reduced the number of colleges it visits for recruitment.

Talking to newspersons in Bangalore on Wednesday, Nandita Gurjar, senior vice-president and group head of human resources at Infosys, said that they have already started going to campuses in about 700 engineering colleges – about half the number it visited in 2007.

Infosys had made 20,000 offers to engineering graduates for the 2009 fiscal, though only around 75-80 per cent of them actually joined the company.

The company says it has been prompted to visit fewer colleges since the conversion rate (the number of people who actually join the company) in the last two years has improved dramatically.

Gurjar said that till 2008, the company used to visit 1,050 engineering colleges for campus recruitments. The number dropped to 700 in 2008. The figure is again expected to fall to 500 or 550 this year – ''Even now, though we plan to visit 700 colleges, we are expecting to get the required numbers from 500 or 550 colleges,'' she said.

The Indian IT services industry has discontinued the earlier practice of selecting the students a year before they complete their graduation and is now visiting colleges in the final semester itself. According to Gurjar, they would be closing the 2009 fiscal with around 18,000 fresh graduates and 3,500 experienced hires, and it is expected that the same hiring numbers are likely for the coming fiscal.