Infosys goes all out to retain talent, increases promotions, ESOP coverage

To retain talent, IT giant Infosys has increased its internal promotions by 3.5 times compared to last year and doubled its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) coverage, according to a news report.

The IT industry, facing an alarming rate of attrition, has been doubling down on reskilling and retaining talent using various monetary and non-monetary compensations. In the first three months of the calendar year 2022, Infosys saw an attrition rate of 27.7 per cent.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm by revenue, witnessed an attrition rate of 17.4 per cent, while HCL Technologies’ attrition rate was 21.9 per cent in the Jan-March quarter. For Wipro and Tech Mahindra, the attrition rates stood at 23.8 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively.

Infosys’ HR development group head, Krish Shankar, said, “Most employees are leaving due to external market demand according to our analysis,” quoted The Economic Times. He added, “It is also due to other personal reasons such as location preference and flexibility (in work) post-pandemic.”

In the last 12 months, the IT firm has also strengthened its “Bridge” programme, which helps a mid-career software engineer become a consultant, power programmer or digital specialist after three months of training.

After reskilling, the candidates can move across streams as they also get higher compensation, Shankar told ET.

The pandemic-led upswing in digitisation spending has resulted in a massive demand for talent in the last few quarters.

Talking to ET, the Infosys HR head said, “college freshers are much better at execution than an experienced employee who passed out five years back.”

The ET report said that Infosys is also giving premium compensations for specific skills and aligned pay on par with market trends in cloud-related areas, big data analytics and specialisations such as SAP and Salesforce fields that faced higher attrition.

The IT firm will also open offices in tier-II locations such as Coimbatore, Vizag, Kolkata, and Noida, to attract employees who are leaving metro cities to stay closer to home, ET reported.

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