Ajoyendra Mukherjee, executive vice-president and head of global human resources, TCS, said the company had carried out an off-campus recruitment drive in January- February.

Last year, TCS, India’s largest software services firm, issued similar number of offer letters to freshers. In 2015, offer letters were issued to over 40,000 freshers, which declined to 35,000 in 2016.

“On account of automation, hiring in the IT sector will go down to a certain extent but it will not freeze. In fact, automation will also create opportunities,” Mukherjee said, adding the company had undertaken a massive reskilling drive of its existing employees so that their job roles could be interchanged as per the requirement of the company.

Under the programme, Agile, which equips employees with digitally updated skill-sets, TCS has already trained 210,000 staff, out of the total of 395,000 on its payroll. Mukherjee, however, said the reskilling drive would not impact the company’s margins, despite its operating margins declining over the past five years. “We have made sufficient investments towards reskilling programmes over the last few years and it is better than opting for outside hiring,” he added.

He blamed the rupee-to-US dollar exchange volatility in the global market for the dip in its operating margins. In the year ended March 31, 2014, TCS’ operating margin stood at 29.1 per cent, which declined to 26.5 per cent in 2015-16 and 24.8 per cent in 2017-18. On the challenges faced in the US, Mukherjee said, “The problem there is that students are not opting for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. We are coming up with initiatives to encourage them to take up core technical disciples.”

TCS has rolled out campaigns like Go IT under which students in the primary grades visit TCS’ delivery centres in the US and learn about robotics and analytics, which, Mukherjee believes, may encourage students to pick up technical subjects. Furthermore, it has partnered Discovery Education to reach up to a million kids and 20,000 educators at school level.

“They need to have a problemsolving mind,” Mukherjee reasoned. He said the IT sector would be requiring engineers armed with managerial skills in the near future.

Asked if TCS can substitute its workforce in the US delivery centres with people from other locations owing to the challenges it faces, Mukherjee said it was always better for the company to employ the local populace. Ninety per cent of its employees in its delivery centres in China, Mexico and Uruguay were locals, he said.

As a fallout of the sanctions on H- 1B visa, TCS has been able to save on its costs as well.

“There are a certain number of visas which can be applied for now. It has now halved to what we used to apply for three years back. Besides, the cost of the visa, there are also costs related to relocation and others which have now come down,” he added.