Infosys to hire 20,000 people this year
03 Jun 2017
IT services major Infosys today said it will hire 20,000 people this year as against only 400 people being asked to leave on performance grounds and added reports of large-scale job losses were "overstated".
According to Infosys COO UB Pravin Rao, the technology-driven transformation presented new opportunities for companies like Infosys.
"With respect to all the talks of layoffs, it's regular performance based things that we do every year. The number is really 300-400, which is consistent with what we have seen every year," Rao told reporters after a 30-minute meeting with IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
He added that India's second largest software exporter was "creating more jobs, adding more people and letting go of only minuscule number of people, purely from performance related perspective".
He, however, offered no comment when asked about the views of Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy that jobs could be protected if the senior executives of companies took salary cuts and invested in employee re-skilling.
He also asserted that IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys continued to hire in large numbers.
"TCS has written that they have employed 2.5 lakh people in last 3 years and this year they are going to employ 20,000 more...all this talk of sluggishness is unwarranted," he said.
On job losses, Rao said, ''we are actually creating more jobs, adding more people and letting go minuscule amount of people and purely from a performance related perspective. I'm very optimistic about the future and opportunities in this sector.''
Meanwhile, Infosys co-chairman Ravi Venkatesan also met the IT minister. Prasad said the two largest IT services firms Infosys and TCS had announced their hiring plans for the year:
''Infosys COO has explained about the job opportunities. Tata Group chairman too has said that TCS has employed 2.5 lakh people in the last three years and this year they are going to employ 20,000 more. So TCS and Infosys have said that they will employ so many and reports of job losses are unwarranted. Infosys is working on payments bank, GST. We spoke over several issues,'' he added.