BOOM & DOOM

STAGNANT STARTING SALARIES, APPEALING NEW TECH JOBS IN OTHER SECTORS, FREQUENT MARKET VOLATILITY, AND NOW ONBOARDING DELAYS. IT SERVICES COMPANIES, THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER MASS RECRUITERS, ARE AT RISK OF LOSING THEIR ALLURE AMONG STUDENTS

- VIDYA S

NITIN GUPTA, A 23-year-old engineering graduate from SVCE Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, received a job offer from Mindtree in April 2022 before its merger with L&T Infotech. Cut to August 2023, a year and a half and multiple rounds of pre-onboarding training tests later, his offer has been revoked. Reason: He failed a pre-onboarding test in July 2023. “There is a disparity between the score my trainer gave me and what the management says I have scored. There is no clarity from them as to how the scores are different,” says Gupta.

His plight is similar to that of several thousands of freshers from the 2022 and 2023 batches of engineering colleges who bagged jobs with IT services companies, on- or off-campus, but are facing endless onboarding delays. If many have not heard back from their prospective employers about a joining date after being promised a job over a year ago, for others it is little solace when companies keep extending joining dates every two-three months. Still others have been compelled to undergo additional training even as their offer letters are nearing expiry, while some like Gupta have had their offers rescinded. They are essentially adrift in an uncertain tech job market.

After the euphoric days of 2021 up to September-October 2022 where the likes of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant, Accenture and several other IT firms hired freshers in droves in anticipation of growth, they are now planning to cut back on hiring freshers due to a weak deal pipeline amid lingering recessionary fears in the US. Staffing firm TeamLease Digital has projected a 30 per cent year-on-year decline in FY24.