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HCL Tech to double fresher hiring

BENGALURU: HCL Technologies, one of the fastest growing IT companies in India, plans to nearly double its campus recruits to 15,000 in the financial year 2020-21, from 8,600 this fiscal. This will include hiring of 500 students from premier B-schools.

“Beginning this fiscal, we have also increased the compensation by 15-20% for all those we take in at the management and technical cadre,” said chief human resources officer Apparao V V.

The bulk of the hires will get annual salaries of Rs 3.6-3.8 lakh.

For management graduates from IIM-Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta, ISB, XLRI and SP Jain, HCL pays between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 23 lakh. For those from IIM-Indore, Kozhikode and Lucknow, it pays between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 18 lakh. MBA graduates from other campuses get Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 7 lakh.

The management graduates go through HCL’s Global Engagement Manager (GEM) training programme. “Those who graduate from GEM largely get absorbed into sales and pre-sales roles. Others go into business analyst roles,” said Apparao. On the technical side, IIT graduates get Rs 12-15 lakh, while those from NITs get Rs 8-12 lakh.

HCL also hires students who have completed their 12th standard and puts them through an intensive one-year programme that includes nine months of classroom training and three months on the job. Those who pass a test also become eligible to simultaneously do engineering in BITS-Pilani.

“We need to hire them to cater to the spurt in demand. We have a strong deal pipeline,” Apparao said.

Engineering graduates pay Rs 2 lakh for a six-month training programme, nonengineering graduates and post-graduates pay Rs 1 lakh for a three-month programme, and class 12 passouts pay Rs 2 lakh for a 12-month programme. The employees also sign a bond with HCL to work with the company for a certain number of years. The company says the payment and bond are necessary because the training makes the candidates very valuable to rivals.

HCL plans to expand its campus recruitment in the US too. About 67% of its US workforce now consists of locals. By the close of this fiscal, the company will have about 20,000 people in the US — about 3,000 more than what it was at the end of fiscal 2019. The plan is to hire 10-15% more next year.

“We have three campuses in the US already. We are trying to have another campus with 1,500-2,000 people. About 70% of our employees work in customer locations now. If we create our own centres, customers might find it easier to run those projects from our campuses than from their facilities. Most customers are currently in high-cost locations. If we do the work from our North Carolina or Dallas campus, it’s in the same time zone as customers, but costs are 25-30% lower,” Apparao said.

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