TCS plans to recruit 50,000 employees in 2011; more for overseas

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The country's largest IT services provider, Tata Consultancy Services, plans to recruit about 50,000 employees in 2011, the same figure as this year's, a top company official said today.

"This year we will add 50,000 people and next year we will add the same (number)," Tata Consultancy Services Managing Director and CEO N Chandrasekaran told reporters here.

He said 30,000 of the 50,000 persons recruited were in the first quarter of this year.

Stating that there are good prospects in the overseas market, he said that TCS would recruit more number of candidates for overseas operations, but did not give exact numbers. "We plan to increase the number everywhere (in the world)," he said.

Currently, TCS has a presence in the US, Latin America, China, the Middle East and European countries.

"In the first year of our operations in China we quickly recruited 1,000 candidates but it took us two years to add 200 more," Chandrasekaran said.

He said the company preferred to maintain the attrition rate at the industry lowest rate of 14 per cent. "Last two-three years it was 9-9.5 per cent. I would not like to see any kind of escalation (in 14 per cent..)", he said.

Chandrasekaran was here to announce the first batch of candidates for TCS Research Fellowship Programme launched by them to promote research.

He said TCS planned to fund about 200 doctoral candidates over five years to take up PhD programmes in academic institutions across India. However, he declined to comment on the funds they planned to spend for this programme.

On future plans, Chandrasekaran said they would soon make an official announcement of a new product in Small and Medium Enterprises. A similar launch was also planned in Business Process Outsourcing platform. Plans are also on to launch services in healthcare platform globally.

"We have launched the health care service in three top notch hospitals and they are already gone live. We want to launch it internationally...", he said.

Chandrasekaran termed the exchange rate as a major challenge and market volatility as a "big problem."

On the Rs 1,000 crore Passport Seva Project joint venture with External Affairs Ministry, he said it was doing very well. "It is being rolled out in phases and we will roll out in 77 sites. I hope in another 5-6 months we will cover pan India".

On implementation, TCS would offer end-to-end services, after which the Ministry expects issuing passports to be completed in three working days and passports under Tatkal scheme to be dispatched he same day.

TCS has about 1.77 lakh employees globally.