Capgemini on hiring spree, head count to hit 1 lakh by April-end

French IT major Capgemini on Thursday said its employee base here will touch 1 lakh by April-end and despite the concerns on protectionism, it will continue to recruit more talent in the country with a bias towards hiring more freshers.

"We will be touching 1 lakh in a few weeks' time...we are at 98,800 employees right now and we shall touch 1 lakh by April-end," Capgemini India Chief Executive Srinivas Kandula said.

The company is the third largest employer among foreign IT companies in the country, after Accenture and IBM, and will continue to add employees here in the future as well, he said. Kandula said there would be a greater focus on hiring freshers who can be taught necessary skills in a rapidly- changing technology world in the future, and added the number of offers as well as the campuses it visited has gone up. Hiring freshers does not entail any "unlearning" which the lateral hires have to do, he said.

Capgemini looks at Asia's third largest economy primarily as a source of talent, and the cost advantages which it offers are secondary, he said.

Till now, the company, present in nine cities with the head office on Mumbai's outskirts, focused on making lateral hirings. It recruited 33,000 people at a gross level, including freshers and laterals, in 2016. Its attrition rate has come down to 20 per cent, Kandula said.