According to reports, HCLTech has witnessed a significant decrease in its net employee addition for the fiscal year 2023, with only 17,067 employees added.
This marks a decline of approximately 57.3% compared to the previous fiscal year’s addition of 39,900 employees.
This reduction in employee hiring coincides with a trend among tech companies to prioritize the improvement of employee utilisation rates.
Fresher hiring target missed
During HCLTech’s Q1FY23 earnings call, its CEO and MD, C Vijayakumar, revealed that the company had set a target of hiring 30,000 freshers for the full year.
However, it appears that this target was not met.
The net number of freshers added to HCLTech’s workforce for the fiscal year 2023 was 26,734.
At present, HCLTech has a total headcount of 225,944 employees.
Hiring target
For the upcoming fiscal year 2024, HCLTech has set a target of adding 15,000 freshers, which is higher than the gross addition.
Although this figure is greater than the net addition of 2,945 employees reported in Q3 of the previous year, it is considerably lower than the 11,100 employees hired during the same quarter of the last fiscal year.
Ramachandran Sundararajan, who serves as the Chief People Officer at HCLTech, has stated that the company successfully honored all offers made to new hires without any delays in the onboarding process.
He further added that this was integrated into the company’s quarterly roll-out plans.
Attrition
The issue of attrition has been a notable topic of discussion.
To summarize, the achievements of HCLTech in the fiscal year 2023 can be attributed to the company’s strong workforce, not only in terms of its size but also the skills of its employees.
The company made significant investments in its upskilling programs throughout the year, as noted by Ramachandran Sundararajan, the Chief People Officer at HCLTech.
On a last twelve months (LTM) basis, the attrition rate for Q4 stood at 19.5 percent, representing a notable decline from the 21.7 percent recorded in the previous quarter and the 21.9 percent recorded in the same quarter of the previous year.
Profit, revenue
HCLTech announced its Q4FY23 results on April 20th. The company’s consolidated net profit for the quarter ending in March 2023 was Rs 3,981 crore, indicating a 10.61 percent increase from Rs 3,599 crore recorded in the previous year.
The company’s revenue from operations for the period was Rs 26,606 crore, representing a 17.74 percent increase from Rs 22,597 crore.
However, the revenue fell short of projections while the profit figures exceeded estimates.
Variable pay
The variable pay programme accounts for only 5 percent of the pay package for approximately 85 percent of the company’s employees, and there have been no changes in the policy.
HCLTech has heavily relied on outsourcing employees from new frontier locations, including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Romania, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil.
How rivals fared
TCS and Infosys, competitors of HCLTech, have also started to reduce their hiring and are concentrating on improving employee utilization.
TCS added only 821 employees in Q4, while Infosys decreased net headcount by 3,611.
