Over 90% of Wipro’s freshers chose lower salary option: CFO Jatin Dalal

Last year, the Bengaluru-based IT major had offered some of its new campus hires four to six-month-long ‘Velocity’ programmes to upgrade their salary packages from the initial offer of Rs 3.5 lakh per annum to Rs 6.5 lakh. However, it later offered some of them the option to choose the original package of Rs 3.5 lakh for faster onboarding in February.

“The environment today is different than what it was a year ago. The race to hire ahead of demand has been replaced by a more measured approach in light of the declining attrition rates and the ongoing economic uncertainty,” Jatin Dalal, chief financial officer at Wipro, to ET.
“The decisions regarding freshers are taken with full fairness and transparency. The next-gen associates were given both the options and 92% of the campus hires chose to join Wipro at the original offer,” Dalal said. “We will continue to onboard next-gen associates based on our business needs throughout the year.”

In February, Pune-based labour union Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES) had filed a complaint against the company with the central labour ministry alleging “unethical reduction” in salary offers of more than 4,000 candidates.

ET could not independently verify the number.

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Dalal said, “Most of the decisions that a company like ours takes is with full transparency, where even if it is known tomorrow morning (to the media), we should be able to justify. It is with the same spirit we took this decision…which we thought was very fair.”In a post-earnings interview, Dalal said, “We also gave options to the employees (to join or not). So I am not being defensive on a decision….but we always believe that we are doing the right thing on an aggregate basis for the employees who are joining us.”

Wipro said it will train the employees on crowdsourcing platform Topcoder and extend other “unique” benefits that is evident from their falling attrition. “We believe we remain very honest to their (freshers’) objective and do the right thing. Some of these adverse reactions would eventually go away,” he said.

In FY23, the company’s net addition to its workforce was 13,793, down to about a third from 45,416 in FY22.

The company has onboarded around 22,000 freshers in FY23–a record intake–but it did not disclose a comparative figure for FY24, saying it will undertake the hiring based on the demand requirements.

On top-level exists and demand

Over the last few months, Wipro has seen the exit of Angan Guha, chief executive of Americas II, and Rajan Kohli, president and head of Wipro digital and consulting businesses.

It shows Wipro’s “deep bench of leadership” that the industry will absorb, the CFO said. “The two executives have left to pursue their ambition of becoming CEOs (of external organisations)… at the same time, we have a deep leadership bench as well, as we have hired top talent from outside. So we feel very comfortable with our abilities,” Dalal said.

In their new assignments, Kohli will be leading mid-cap firm CitiusTech while Guha will head Birlasoft, another mid-cap IT firm.

On the overall demand, Dalal said the IT industry is going through a “short period of adjustment” where clients are prioritising spends, mainly the discretionary spends are being paused.

“I don’t know how short (such) a period is, but I have seen in the past that such periods don’t last long,” he said.

The company had guided a -3% to -1% decline in revenue for the June quarter. The management had called out demand softness seen in banking, financial services, insurance (BFSI), retail and consulting verticals.