Tech firms to hire freshers in just-in-time (JIT)
New Delhi: Learning from last year's turmoil, India's leading tech firms are now changing to a just-in-time (JIT) model for hiring freshers. Two leading software companies - Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies have said that they would recruit freshers following the model, beginning January 2010.
The new strategy is quite different than the previous year's hiring strategy, when firms hired software engineers in hordes from campuses. These new recruits were kept on bench for many months till they were allocated projects, reports Economic Times.
Wipro's Joint CEO for IT Business Suresh Vaswani said that the company plans to hire on JIT basis. "We will visit the campuses, and take up candidates, only when we get committed business or see deals closing . Earlier companies used to grab a large number of good resources, and put them on bench. They were utilised only when a project came."
"We will start hiring from campuses, from December-January , in the eighth semester of BTech/BE students. Earlier, we used to give offer letters almost a year in advance. Now, we plan to dole out offers, as per our need," said a TCS spokeswoman.
"Business environment has completely changed in the last 15 months. Nevertheless, we have honored every offer letter we issued. Going forward we want to be flexible and may increase the range of offer from six to twelve months," said Vaswani.
Just-in-time model for human resources is generally followed in manufacturing sector for stocking inventory. Indian car maker Maruti and U.S. computer giant Dell follow this model. The move may reduce the costs required for maintaining human resource inventory, called as 'bench' in IT parlance. The following of JIT model by IT companies will mean that job offers will be made over a period of time, next year. It effectively means that there would be a harder scramble for offers, in the coming job placement season.
"Freshers will have to be flexible regarding job location now. They should start planning early and have 3-4 job offers in hand," says Anita Belani, Country Head for Right Management.
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