Sharp Decline: Infosys' College Graduate Hiring Tanks 76% In FY24

Salil Parekh, CEO and managing director of Infosys, said in its latest annual report, “We recruited nearly 11,900 college graduates in the year and ended the year with over 3,17,000 employees"

Infosys, India’s second-largest IT services company, experienced a significant decline in hiring college graduates, with only around 11,900 hired in the fiscal year 2023-24 ending in March, according to data from its annual reports. This starkly contrasts with the over 50,000 graduates hired in the previous year.

Salil Parekh, CEO and managing director of Infosys, said in its latest annual report for FY24, “We recruited nearly 11,900 college graduates in the year and ended the year with over 3,17,000 employees.”

Previously, during the fiscal year FY23, Infosys onboarded more than 50,000 college graduates, bringing its total employee count to 343,234 by the end of the financial year.

Reflecting industry trends, throughout the financial period spanning from April 2023 to March 2024, the IT giant saw a reduction in its total headcount by 25,994 individuals, leading to a decrease of 7.5 per cent in its total employee base, which now stands at 317,240.

Additionally, Infosys experienced a decrease in attrition, with the rate declining to 12.6 per cent from 12.9 per cent in the previous year.

“We are into the second year of the generative AI revolution, and some clarity is beginning to emerge from the noise and babble of the last 18 months. The initial hyperventilation of AI doomerism and the risk of human extinction by AI advances like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has quietened down,” Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman and co-founder of Infosys, told shareholders.

“The productivity gains from automation must lead to talent redeployment in new areas with new opportunities. We must learn from applying AI to ourselves, be it in creating an AI-first enterprise or in accelerating the massive talent amplification that’s now needed,” Nilekani added.

Infosys has provided AI skills training to over 250,000 employees, underscoring Parekh's assertion to shareholders that  “Infosys is the leading company in AI and generative AI today.”

Nilekani further emphasised that there will not be a scenario where a single model dominates all others.

“Every day brings new advances in large language models (LLMs) from a dizzying set of actors all pushing for greater innovation. These range from very large models which need massive computing infrastructure to small ones that can run locally on the phone. The real power of AI will come from configuring all the different models and tools to get the best solutions,” Nilekani said.