India's top IT firms such as TCS, Infosys, HCL and Wipro – plan to hire more than 1 lakh freshers this fiscal. But the intent and and ability to hire are different things, explains Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno.

IT firm Cognizant plans to hire 30,000 freshers and 1,00,000 laterals this year, which translates to onboarding nearly 300 experienced professionals every day.

To onboard around 400 laterals a day, an IT firm would need to make offers to 700 people a day, as IT services enterprises have a dropout ratio of more than 40%, said Karanth

Though IT has robust hiring processes and large talent acquisition teams, this is a challenging year to hire laterals, says Karanth. "If the mix is 75:25 between freshers and laterals, then it’s feasible,” he added.

Offer acceptance rates have fallen dramatically, especially for skills with severe shortages.

The offer acceptance rate at IT services companies for roles like full-stack engineer, data engineer, data scientist, DevOps engineers has dropped to about 45%, from over 80%, Xpheno data shows.

Onboarding as a proportion of total offers has dropped to less than 50% for IT services firms as employees are sitting on multiple offers, said Saravanan Balasundaram, CEO of talent consultancy firm Han Digital.
Firms are taking exceptional approvals to make higher salary offers quickly so that candidates get less time to shop for other offers, he added.

Meanwhile, there has been an increase of 100% in salaries for critical roles in cloud, cloud native, mean stack developers, told Sriram Rajagopal, managing partner of talent solutions firm Diamondpick.