As the slowdown impacts hiring as well as attrition rates in the information technology industry, leading recruiters like Wipro Technologies said that while it will honour offer letters already sent out to freshers, the company would defer recruitments by a quarter or so.

A highly placed source in Wipro's Kolkata office said that it was now waiting for more clear signals from its clients to take a call on further recruitment.

"The cloud of uncertainty is likely to lift in some time, and companies would be able to take more concrete decisions thereafter. Of the offer letters sent out, recruitment could be deferred in case of some", the source said while refusing to give out a time-frame.

"It could be a quarter or even more than that", the source added.
Wipro had around 7000 people working in its Kolkata center, almost equally divided between its business process outsourcing and infotech operations.

It had recruited a couple of thousand people in Kolkata last year.
The source did not want to give out this year's figures.

According to Nasscom, the attrition rates had come down by 6-7 per cent in the last few months due to volatile market conditions.
This had, in turn, impacted fresh hiring by companies as well, as they now needed to hire fewer replacement staff.

Industry insiders said that companies were now hiring closer to completion of projects instead of hiring much before and keeping people on benches.

Companies were now looking at operationalising resources and could shed some people waiting in the benches.

Adding to this, former Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik said that organisations now needed to decide who were useful, people with years of experience or the ones with competence.

"Experience has to be cumulative, it cannot be one year's experince repeated over a number of years. In a fast changing and growing technological era, even competence is a perishable commodity", Karnik said.

(Source: Business Standard)