Wipro has increased fresher salaries to Rs 3.5 lakh per annum, from about 3.2 lakh. Salaries of campus recruits had remained stagnant for many years across the industry.
“We are also introducing a coding test to improve the quality of hires. We are looking to roll out a broad-based national talent test to expand the reach of our hiring process. We are hiring 25-30% more than last year,” said Wipro president and chief human resources officer Saurabh Govil.
Others like TCS and Infosys have also adopted such strategies. TCS has launched a national level test. And these companies are offering significantly higher salaries to freshers with better coding skills.
Wipro has a three-tier campus outreach. The first involves hires from star colleges like the IITs, and they are offered an average salary of Rs 12 lakh. Then there’s what it calls the turbo programme, where it pays Rs 6.5-7 lakh per employee. And then there’s the traditional hires.
Govil said Wipro is working with colleges to train students on specific modules. “We have collapsed the internal training period to 1-2 weeks in some cases to deploy them faster,” he said.
The company has increased outreach in US campuses, where they are setting up a similar cadre building mechanism for talent in areas like machine learning, analytics and AI. The average salaries for US campus hires is $65,000.
Govil said attrition among those under 5 years of experience is rising. He is trying to address it through a combination of salary correction, skill allowance, training them on newer technologies and exposing them to different projects.
Wipro’s employee strength rose by 10,687, the highest in 15 quarters. But this includes the 9,000 coming in from Wipro’s acquisition of Alight’s captive centre operations.