HCLTech to roll out pay hikes October onwards, targets hiring of 10,000 freshers this year

Indian IT services firm HCLTech (HCL Technologies Ltd) on Thursday said it will start rolling out pay hikes for junior employees October onwards and that mid- and senior-management won't take any wage hikes in FY24.

“We had deferred pay revision by a quarter. We will now be going ahead with pay revision this quarter, from October onwards. Mid- and senior-management won’t take pay hikes in FY24. But for 90% of our employees, we will go ahead with pay revision,” said the company’s chief people officer Ramachandran Sundararajan at a post-Q2 earnings press conference.

In terms of variable payout, Sundararajan shared that a majority of employees will be receiving around 85% of their earmarked variable pay amount, reported Moneycontrol.

“Quarterly variable pay is 3% of the annual compensation of the individual. All colleagues will get quarterly variable pay this quarter. The majority of them should receive 85% of the variable pay,” he said.

The top HCLTech official also said that the Noida-headquartered IT services company will continue to hire freshers from campus and will target hiring 10,000 freshers this year compared to around 27,000 freshers it recruited in 2022-23.

HCLTech CEO and Managing Director C Vijayakumar said the growth during the first half has been much lesser than expected, and the company will need to post strong growth on a sequential-quarter basis, both in the third and fourth quarter, to match the growth guidance for the full year.

''The discretionary spend is still very soft. We have not seen the discretionary spend pick up like we anticipated,'' Vijayakumar said.

Infosys Ltd also said on Thursday that it would start rolling out wage hikes to its employees from November 1.

At a post-earnings press conference, Salil Parekh, MD and CEO of Infosys, said, “ Wage hikes to employees will be rolled out from November 1.”

The company did not make any announcements regarding variable pay.

Infosys and HCL Technologies on Thursday tweaked their full-year revenue outlook as macroeconomic challenges continue to weigh on global discretionary spends.

Infosys Ltd posted a 3.1 per cent rise in its second-quarter net profit in line with the market expectations but cut its annual sales forecast in a clear sign of continuing curtailment in IT projects amid macro uncertainties.

The Bengaluru-headquartered Infosys cut its FY24 growth outlook by 100 basis points to 1-2.5 per cent against 1-3.5 per cent guided earlier.

Infosys cautioned that discretionary projects and large transformation programmes have reduced significantly and indicated that it could give campus recruitment a miss this year though it is monitoring the situation every quarter.

HCLTech has reduced revenue growth guidance for the full year in the range of 5-6 per cent from 6-8 per cent projected at the end of June 2023 quarter due to its below-expectation performance during the first half of the current fiscal.