Indian software maker Infosys is weeks away from crossing the 100,000-employee mark and joining Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in the prestigious club.

Infosys currently employs 82,000 people and has made job offers in more than a thousand engineering colleges in India.

“We have given 18,000 offers. This shows our confidence in the business. We will soon employ in excess of one lakh people in India,” says T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director of Human Resources and former CFO at Infosys.

The company expects the conversion rate (number of candidates employed) to be between 70 and 80 percent.

Infosys has announced plans to hire a total of 25,000 employees this year in IT, business process outsourcing and consulting services. For comparison, Tata Consultancy Services has plans to hire between 30 and 35 thousand new employees, including 20,000 fresh hires from 200-250 colleges.

IT analyst Apurva Shah says: “Headcount addition is in line with their guidance and shows the business confidence despite question marks over the U.S. economy.”

The company is aggressively hiring, but also taking steps to fight off attrition. “We are tightening our assessment of top performers. We would also introduce variable pays for middle and senior-level management,” says Pai.

 

The company has a new performance-based pay structure that can make a difference between average and top employees’ salaries to vary up to 40 percent. “Our attrition is 13.4 percent and we want to get it in single digits,” comments Infosys’ head of human resources, Nandita Gurjar.

 

Companies in the IT and business management sector employ a total of about two million people in India. Local technology giants Tata Consultancy and Infosys have most of their staff based in India.

Global industry leaders IBM and Accenture employ 368,000 and 172,000 people worldwide respectively and, because of the lower costs in India, they are currently waging a war for talent in the country, for employees and staff in middle management.

This is not to say that Infosys does not recruit new employees abroad. This year, the company has hired more than 20 people from UK campuses and 145 from US campuses. 

 

 

The management consulting careers site Top-Consultant.com has a number of career events scheduled for the coming months.

If you are interested in attending open evenings with IBM or the Place Group, please make sure you fill out the registration forms on the Events page by the end of the month.

Open evenings provide job seekers with an excellent opportunity to check out a company and its employees before applying for a job there and they often help consultants decide on the next step in their career.

IBM hosts a Recruitment Open Evening for SAP Professionals on June 12th. The company is eager to meet seasoned SAP professionals who are interested in joining their Global Business Services Team.

The Place Group Open Evenings will be hosted in Birmingham, Manchester and London in May and June. The consultancy is currently recruiting Consultants, Project Managers and Client Directors across England to join their team of professionals who aim to deliver 21st century education to British schools and pave the way in the transformation of Children's Services.

To find out about other career events and how they may benefit your career, please visit Top-Consultant.

IBM will host a career event for SAP professionals on June 12, 2008.

The company is recruiting SAP experts with “extensive client facing consulting skills, developed through multiple project lifecycles, with industry specific expertise” in any of the following sectors:

• Oil
• Banking
• Retail
• Utilities
• Public Sector
• Distribution
• Communications

If you are ready for the next big step in your career or would like to learn more about working for IBM Global Business Services, the company has invited you to attend the Recruitment Open Evening on June 12.

Attendance is invitation only due to limited spaces. To receive an invitation, please fill out the registration form available at Top-Consultant.

In the meantime, you are welcome to browse and apply for the latest IBM jobs on our IT job board.

The online recruitment website the IT Job Board has revealed some of the statistics the site has collected over time. The numbers show that recent graduates who want to start a career in information technology by entering a graduate scheme are much more likely to do so in London than anywhere else.

Approximately 50 percent of all graduate openings are in London. For reference, a third of all IT jobs on the market are London-based, as reported by IT salary, appointments and trend data provider Salary Services Ltd.

IT staffing company InterQuest Group's director David Bevan says: "People tend to move between jobs more frequently in London, so openings arise on a more regular basis. The flip side is a higher level of competition for jobs, and greater pressure to perform once in them." Once graduates have established themselves in their field, says Bevan, they tend to leave London and market their skills elsewhere.

Womenitechnology.co.uk director Maggie Berry says that ''while people automatically associate large companies' headquarters with London, many organizations have realized over the last decade that there is no need to pay London salaries or London rents for roles that could be done just as effectively in other parts of the country.''

Graduates, however, tend to gravitate toward London.

Even though graduate schemes in the capital come with a much higher starting salaries, Sam Baxendale, a manager at the recruitment consultancy Computer People says: "In general, graduate schemes in London pay half as much again as similar schemes in outer London and the South East, in part due to the influence of the financial sector in the City," adding:

"When the cost of living and transport are taken into account, graduates outside London are effectively getting the same money, with a better quality of life. But people want to work in London because of the buzz, because they think they'll have better access to a broader range of opportunities through networking with more people."

 

Apply for the latest IT consulting jobs on our IT consulting job board.

Wipro Technologies, the Bangalore-based global provider of technology, process and integrated business solutions plans to open a low-cost software development facility in the UK.

Depending on such factors as tax breaks, government incentives and access to science and engineering graduates, the Indian IT company will choose among several areas to open the next delivery centre. The areas include Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Warwick and Cranfield.

Wipro chairman Azim Premji says: "What we are looking for is a center which has good education facilities. That's extremely critical. And when I say education facilities I don't mean arts colleges I mean science and engineering colleges.

We want a center where the general profile of the young girls and boys graduating there is of a nature where they would like to work in that area, they have family roots in that area, they come from a background which is comfortable in that area and don't necessarily want to migrate to... the larger cities."

Wipro's UK branch has its central office in Reading, where the company employs 300 people. In line with the trend of ''reverse offshoring,'' the company has also recently opened new customer support facilities near Detroit and Atlanta.

The Indian company's aim is to recruit more people in the western countries, get higher end consulting services and increase the annual revenue by 12.5 to 15 percent over the next five years.

Premji adds: "Our objective would be to have our people force in Europe, which is resident in Europe, at least 50-60 percent local Europeans and we are rapidly driving towards that. We are dead serious about this. We want to build a local cadre. We generate a much stronger image for bidding for local contracts, which is also important."

In a similar move, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the other Indian global information technology services provider, has recently announced a new delivery centre that will employ 1,000 people in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Accenture is looking for SAP experts to join their team of IT professionals in the company's Edinburgh office. The IT consultancy has extended an invitation to all SAP professionals who are ready for the next big step in their career to attend the SAP Recruitment Event in Edinburgh at 6pm on April 10.

With several decades of expertise in the field and more than 20,000 experts worldwide, Accenture is a recognized global leader in SAP implementation services. Accenture consultants help their clients, FORTUNE 500 companies, overcome all the challenges in information technology and implement solutions that set their businesses on the fast track to success.

The consultancy firm implements over a thousand large-scale SAP projects each year and is looking to recruit more IT professionals for a wide range of SAP roles.

The company will also host a SAP Virtual Recruitment Event between 8am and 7pm on April 18. You can register for the event on the Accenture website. In the meantime, you can apply for the latest Accenture jobs on our IT consulting job board.