Jobs update: IT companies struggling to hire lateral talent

Despite having robust hiring process and large talent acquisition teams, IT companies are finding it challenging to recruit talent, especially experienced professionals, according to a report in The Times of India. Hiring laterals has been challenging this year, due to the unavailability of the mix of 75:25 between freshers and laterals. In July IT giant Cognizant had planned to hire 1,00,000 laterals and 30,000 freshers this year. Everyday, the company plans to onboard nearly 300 experienced professional.

Offer acceptance rates on a decline

For skills with severe shortages, offer acceptance rates have seen a downward spiral. According to data from Xpheno, the offer acceptance rates for roles like full-stack engineer, data scientist, DevOps engineers has dropped to about 45%, from over 80% at IT services companies.

Due to these high drop-out ratios, companies have to make offers to about 700 people a day, to onboard about 400 laterals in a day.

As a proportion of total offers, Han Digital a talent consultancy firm has reported that its on boarding has dropped to less than 50% for IT firms, as employees are sitting on multiple offers. Companies are also hiking salary offers at a faster pace, through exceptional approvals which would give candidates less time to shop for other offers.

Talent solutions firm, Diamondpick said that those having certifications with Salesforce, S4, Hana and Snowflake draw good premiums. Also, good java developers with in-demand microservices skillsets having more than five years of experience can move from Rs 7.5 lakhs to nearly Rs 14 lakhs.

There has also been a 100% spike in salaries for critical roles in cloud, cloud native and mean stack developers, it added.