With attrition in the IT industry reaching all-time highs, large outsourcers like TCS and Infosys are focusing more on hiring freshers from campuses and providing them relevant training to expand their talent pool. Meanwhile, midsize IT companies are putting in place a slew of measures to help broaden their talent pool amid sharply increasing attrition.

According to a report in the Economic Times, they are working on strengthening their employer brand so that freshers and lateral hires choose them over their larger peers. While many new employees are lateral hires from other similar sized companies, they are also trying to expand the fresher pool.

The financial daily mentioned that L&T Infotech (LTI) intends to hire 5,500 freshers in this financial year. “We are hiring another 1,000 people on a hire-train-deploy basis,” the publication quoted CEO Sanjay Jalona as saying. The company is also putting in place a plan to hire non-technical people and put them through a six-month training programme in order to meet the demand for specific skills.

Similarly, Pune-headquartered Persistent Systems is tapping into engineering talent in traditional industries where people are not well paid. “There are people who are engineers by training who work in other industries. They are seeing their peers in tech getting higher salaries and they are good at what they do… these are the kind of people we are looking at in some percentage to train into the skill sets that we want and deploy,” the ET report quoted Sandeep Kalra, CEO, Persistent Systems as saying. 

Kalra further added that hiring from other companies was a zero-sum game and not a way to address the shortage. Most firms reported attrition at about 20% for the second quarter of this fiscal, considerably higher than even in the previous quarter.