Cognizant to hire 20,000 ‘digitally ready’ freshers with starting salary of ₹4 lakh per annum

After a massive structural rejig with layoffs and cost cutting last year, Cognizant is back to sprucing up its employee base. It is looking to hire over 20,000 digitally skilled Indian tech graduates in 2020. It is also scaling up the average compensation for campus freshers to ₹400,000 per annum. This is an 18% surge from last year’s campus placements last year.

Last week, Cognizant became operational in Mangaluru with their new facilities that can accommodate 1,100 employees. The company presently has nearly 80 clients in India across industry verticals.

Expanding the base of engineers and tech graduates is a part of its strategy to build on new age businesses by hiring those with digital skills. It is hence looking to strengthen its core areas of data, digital engineering, cloud, and internet of things (IoT).

The hiring comes right after extensive job cuts in Cognizant in 2019. As many as 7,000 mid and senior level jobs were axed: accounting for 2% of its global workforce. The company had said that nearly 5,000 employees will be redeployed into other job roles.

“To improve cost structure to partially fund these investments and advance Cognizant’s growth agenda, it has made the decision to remove approximately 10,000-12,000 mid-to-senior level associates worldwide from their current roles in coming quarters. The job cuts were expected to help the company save $500 million by 2021”, said Karen McLaughlin, CFO of Cognizant.

“India is an attractive market. The acceptance rate for offers we have made in about 100 premier engineering campuses is more than 80%, reflecting increased confidence in the company. This is much higher than in recent years,” said Brian Humphries, CEO of Cognizant.

Cognizant is also looking to re-skill its employees in new-age technologies which are its business areas. “To ensure we have the right digital skills in a supply-constrained environment, we have doubled our investment in Cognizant Academy in 2020. To accelerate our digital momentum, we believe we need to hire or reskill approximately 25,000 resources in 2020, and we have started to operationalise this," Humphries said.