TCS offers to pay double to candidates qualifying in fresh test

The IT major launched the TCS National Qualifier Test that attracted nearly 2.2 lakh candidates last year. TCS is now planning a stepped-up test to find out the best and it is going to be one of the toughest tests in the industry, a Hindu BusinessLine report quoted TCS’ chief operating officer as saying.

TCS has been trying to attract top talent in large numbers without the need to visit each campus. The TCS National Qualifier Test also reduced the hiring time to six weeks from four months earlier. The company says it had sent offer letters to 30,000 candidates.

Now the company is offering those who had cleared the National Qualifier test another test and if they come out successful TCS would call them Hot Talent and offer double the salary they were offered earlier, reports citing senior HR official at TCS said, adding that it would be offered to existing employees – those who have put in a few years of service – as well.

TCS says it has been trying to change the terms of talent hiring, in terms of recognising talent and to work with customers in more open and agile way.

Out of the 30,000 people who got selected in the national test, TCS has identified 1,300 to take a more advanced test that could prove them to be the hot talent. For internal employees, while it is still work in progress, about 2,500 people have been identified.

TCS is also trying to speed up training time to make fresh recruits productive from their first day of work. Online training through the FrescoPlay platform is helping TCS accelerate the shift towards digitalisation. Now, instead of teaching generic computing skills to everyone, TCS can customise training as per individual strength and business requirement.

TCS has also been increasing the proportion of variable pay that’s linked to performance for experienced engineers as part of the rejig. The process — called pyramid rationalisation — is predicated on having a larger number of employees with less than four years of experience and fewer employees with progressively more experience, and as a result, a reduced salary bill.

The employee pyramid is the cornerstone of Indian IT’s margin management. The model keeps getting refreshed, recalibrated, relaunched every few years. IT companies such as Cognizant have also talked about pyramid restructuring as part of their strategy to lower costs. The Teaneck, New Jersey-based company cut about 400 senior employees through a voluntary retirement scheme and asked more than 200 senior employees to leave. TCS, however, is not looking at those ways to manage its pyramid.

The cost structures, TCS says, can be more performance-oriented. The company has already tied pay to performance at different levels and different parts of the organisation.

TCS added 26,453 employees in FY19 and an equivalent number in the first six months of FY20, while 3,500 employees left the company. At the end of the second quarter, TCS had over 4,50,000 employees.

Meanwhile, top three patent filers in the information technology industry in 2017-’18 included Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services, followed by a seven-year-old startup Hike, according to the most recent Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade data.

Tata Consultancy Services, which has a research facility dating back to 1981, has been investing in deep learning, nanomaterials, cognitive computing, and genomics in recent years.

Meanwhile, Wipro has been strategically pursuing intellectual property creation by enabling technology teams with IP research inputs, instituting an IP reward policy, creating a framework for legal processing of ideas, and commissioning IP workflow tools.