Wipro Comments on Employee Attrition and Hiring Plans

Wipro reported a strong quarter, with revenue growth of 41% and net income growth of 48%. Employee attrition and hiring were a key focus of the company's earnings call with analysts:

Moshe Katri - Cowen & Company

Can you also comment on the sequential increases in turnover rates during the past few quarters? I think for this quarter you are at 18% which is relatively high, what are we doing to bring down those levels?

Prateek Kumar - Wipro, HR

The attrition rate is 17.5% which has been rounded off to 18%. In the previous quarter it was at 17.1%. So, we have not seen any noticeable change from what we experienced in the last quarter. As Suresh shared with you all, we had our grants kicking in in previous quarter and we also had the salary increase on for our employees which was effective from September, which covered almost two-thirds of our employees. The balance are going to get covered in November. We have already seen the early signs of declines from the time we affected some of these changes and we are hoping with all these actions which we are taking we should be able to see a southward trend from this quarter onward on attrition.

Bryan Keane - Prudential

Can you talk to us a little bit on the hiring environment? we’re hearing kind of mixed things coming out of India about recruitment for freshers. Can you talk about what Wipro is doing in kind of what you see going forward for hiring?

Prateek Kumar

Our hiring strategies will continue to be two-prong. We’ll continue to hire from the engineering schools of which comprises roughly about 50% of our total hiring effort. We’ll continue to look for good talent to come in from the experienced talent pool which we referred to as lateral hiring.

The one thing which we have done consciously this year is that we have shifted to a more even spread of rookie joining into the company instead of all of them coming in at one point, at one time of the year and that we have been able to make that transition fairly comfortably.

What we are also doing in addition is that we are experimenting with the non-engineering talent pool as well. So, these are the Bachelor of Science graduates and this year just to help you understand, we will be taking in between 1,700 to 2,000 people in our software business. Taking them through intensive training program and get them ready to be deployed on our assignments within the organization.

So, we are quite comfortable, the way we look at our opportunities for bringing in the right kind of talent and with the investment which we have made in our training capability we think we should be able to manage this.

Bryan Keane - Prudential

What percentage in new hires or freshers now?

Prateek Kumar

It's roughly 50%.

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