The Hindu Business Line : Wipro offers campus recruits job switch

Bangalore, Dec. 2 Wipro Technologies, the third largest software exporter, has given an option for engineering recruits to join its business process outsourcing (BPO) division to offer technical support services, indicating a slowdown in new IT services contracts.

The shift in the job profile to new recruits would be in the eastern region initially; Wipro has opening for tech-based services at its Kolkata facility.

Till the end of September, Wipro has managed to absorb only a fourth of the 13,500 engineering graduates to whom it had made offers at campuses in 2007-08. In the current year, Wipro has issued some 8,000 offer letters to engineering students, who would be joining the company next year.

“This is a systemic response to the economic scenario. We are extremely circumspect and closely watching the situation,” said Mr Pradeep Bahirwani, Vice-President, Talent Acquisition, Wipro Technologies. Stating that technical support role requires engineering graduates, Mr Bahirwani said “if we had not made this offer to campus recruits, we would have to hire fresh engineers from outside.”

“We have a supply on IT side and the demand on BPO side. We are managing the two,” Mr Bahirwani said, adding the company has retained the salary stack for engineering graduates joining the BPO jobs as per the original offer. Their experience will be considered relevant and continuous when they move into IT services after 12 to 18 months, as and when there is a requirement.

The current requirement for tech support engineers has come up at Wipro’s BPO facility in Kolkata and the job-switch offer was made to students from West Bengal, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. Reacting to the offer, students had protested in Kolkota over the week-end as they believed that they had to take a salary cut. Also, they felt that taking up a BPO job will be a dampener on their job profile as engineers.

However, when the company clarified that their salary stack would be maintained, about 95 per cent of the students to whom the offers were made were willing to take up the job, Mr Bahirwani said. However, he refused to disclose the number of engineering graduates taking the offer.

Mr Bahirwani said the new initiative in resourcing for campus recruits is a here-and-now opportunity to let engineering graduates commence work without delay. Wipro has about 16,500 employees in its BPO division.

Indian IT vendors such as Wipro and Infosys are facing uncertainty as customers in the US, impacted by the recession, have held back their spending on deploying new technology applications. As a result, growth for these Indian vendors has slowed down in the recent quarters.