Contrary to popular belief that the global financial meltdown would impact the pace of hiring, India's top two software exporters Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies will stick to their hiring plans for 2009-10.

Published media reports indicated that while TCS plans to stick with the 24,789 campus offers it has made for jobs, Infosys proposes to up its job offers by 18 per cent to about 20,000 for the 2009-10 period. However, close rival Wipro Technologies is reducing the number of new hires from 14,000 to 8,000, a report in Economic Times says.

The newspaper quoted though there were apprehension of IT companies reneging on their job promises to students, till date the industry hadn't reported a single such case. Of course, there were reports of companies postponing joining dates.

The article quoted TCS Vice President Ajoy Mukherjee as saying that the company had sent out 22,000 campus offers this year and they intend getting these people on board as part of the company's plans to hire between 30,000 to 35,000 in the next financial year.

In fact, companies are trying to flatten the employee pyramid whereby the least-experienced and lowest=paid would make up the biggest proportion of the workforce. The article said that 40 per cent of the staff on the Big-3 IT companies have less than three years experience.

In addition, companies were also looking to break away from linearity whereby revenue increases are tied to enhancing the headcount. The article quoted Wipro Executive VP Pratik Kumar as saying that his company would push for non-linearity while building on the skill-sets of employees.