In the past few years, Indian IT has been heavily criticised for extending offer letters to freshers and then delaying onboarding. In certain cases, these giants rescinded their offer, citing potential cost-cutting measures, with the rise of generative AI adoption being named a key factor. Cut to this year, not a lot has changed.
In a rant on Reddit, a developer alleged that LTIMindtree was not giving out joining letters to the freshers of the 2024 batch. “Instead of on-boarding us, they are hiring for 2025. I’ve been waiting for the last two months for the offer letter,” said the developer.
He added that there is no information on the joining date, and only a handful of them got onboarded. Nodding to this, developers have been flocking to the discussion. “I had an offer for ’23 graduate, November as joining, they delayed it till May 2024, shamelessly asking me to join their internship program first for 2 weeks. If I clear the exam, I get the placement,” said a software developer.
Companies like Cognizant and TCS have also been accused of following this practice. “…Especially with their CSD training. They wasted our 6 months and then assigned us to a completely different domain and a support project,” said a developer about Cognizant.
Vouching for this, another developer, who currently works for the organisation, said that they were promised developer roles but ended up in tech support. “This organisation is just filled with support projects. Close to 95% of the graduates from my training batch were put into support,” they added, ruing that even the skills do not seem to matter much here.
“Waiting for my Capgemini offer letter from 2020,” another developer chipped in.
What was the Promise?
In October 2022, Indian IT biggies, such as Wipro, Infosys, and Tech Mahindra, had delayed the onboarding for months and were all revoking offer letters, affecting nearly 30,000 freshers. Indian IT firms had largely stopped hiring freshers in 2023.
Adding insult to injury, the “hired” freshers, who were waiting endlessly to receive their joining letters, were blamed for not meeting the qualification criteria for the job role. This trend was expected to continue this year, along with rampant possible layoffs. Though the layoffs didn’t happen, the hiring has definitely stopped.
However, in their latest earnings call, Indian IT giants have promised that they would continue reducing their bench size and also hire freshers to increase the headcount. For example, Infosys announced that it is on track to onboard 15,000 to 20,000 freshers at the group level in FY25, though it did not break down the numbers between the current and previous years. All freshers will be onboarded within that range.
Similarly, HCLTech said that it has added 2,932 freshers during its latest Q2 FY25 results. “We had added about 12,000 freshers in FY24 when the campus hiring across the sector was very muted,” said C Vijaykumar, the CEO of HCLTech, adding that though the headcount in total has declined, the wage bill has gone up as they are restructuring the pyramid with specialised skills.
Though there was no mention of the hiring of freshers in its latest earnings call in August, Cognizant was offering an INR 2.5 LPA salary for freshers. Though it was later said that the figure was just for the interns, the offering was still very low and matched exactly with the package offered decades ago in 2002.
As for TCS, Milind Lakkad, the chief human resource officer at TCS, said during Q2 FY25 call that it welcomed 11,000 associates in the first half of the year, and the company remains on track for trainee onboarding as planned. “We have also commenced the campus hiring process for FY26,” he added.
Reportedly, in July this year, TCS had 80,000 job openings which it was unable to fill citing skills issues among the graduates.
What to Do?
This problem of delayed hiring has been an ongoing one for years. The developers have figured out that applying for any WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCLTech) job means applying to 10 other jobs at the same time as they would have to wait for months before actually getting any response. “My joining letter came 8 months later when I was a fresher for Infosys, I’ve lost almost a year of experience I could’ve had. The best option is to keep applying to other companies,” said a developer.
Some developers have waited for two years after having sat for interviews for the Ninja role at TCS. Instead, they could have gathered two years of experience elsewhere and applied for better jobs. “Many of my friends who went into WITCH companies are now on the bench with uncertainty around whether or not a project will be assigned to them,” shared another software engineer.
It’s time Indian IT paid attention to really fix its broken hiring process.
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