This is the reason why Infosys terminated hundreds of freshers in Mysuru

In the sprawling Infosys training campus in Mysuru, which sports a façade resembling Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, hundreds of thousands of young engineers are trained, leading to careers that could take them anywhere from Sydney to California. But when the trainers began their sessions in September 2024, they got worried.Sessions that should have some participation had an uneasy silence. Some of the trainees asked, “Could we have the classes in Telugu or Hindi?” And alarm bells started ringing.The trainers know that the freshers who come from smaller towns and colleges would not be extremely fluent in English, but they do require some conversational skills in the language. After all, they would need to be able to talk to clients.While the trainers discounted their ability to speak English, they went on to explore how well they were equipped in skills in which they graduated. When they began to test their engineering knowledge, the shock was bigger — they didn’t even know the basics.Back to campusTrainers decided to find out why these batches were different from the thousands they had trained before. When they went back to the background and the timing of their hiring — there was a pattern that emerged.These were mostly candidates who were hired by the company remotely during the Covid pandemic when most of the country was locked down with little scope for any physical interaction, and on-boarded after a significant gap.Infosys has been running its mini-engineering college in Mysuru for about two decades and in a typical batch, about 2-5% of the students wash out before completing their training. For the batch hired during Covid, the numbers were running closer to 30%.“There was a lot of sympathy for them because they were young,’’ said a person familiar with the matter. “But because their classes were remote during the pandemic, they were struggling with foundational skills.”Then began hectic conversations between various teams in the management about how to handle the situation. It was clear that many of the candidates would require far more additional training — over and above the four or five months of training that are generally provided — as they lacked even the basics.Worse, clients would reject them, and it would impact the company’s client relationships. IT companies have strict service-level agreements, so if a client rejects more than a certain percentage of employees due to being deployed on their project, it results in more stringent contract clauses being activated. So, Infosys decided to let go of the freshers — terminating nearly 800 trainees.The decision resulted in social media outrage and sympathies from all quarters. Some felt the youngsters’ careers were being thrown to the wind for a few pennies of more profit for Infosys, which had a revenue of nearly $20bn last fiscal year. medium nocaptionhttps://pll.tgsession.com/3sw658_7hzteqpqoj/1kaUxRlY7mX-XC?2qxpm=6dwu3EN_cWHgxp6uHv3Ediihgxflu miscalculationWhen Covid struck, the panic the world plunged into led to extreme assumptions about the future of not just life, but even about economies and business possibilities. The tech industry and Infosys were no exceptions.Most of the technology companies slashed their headcount fearing the worst. But the exact opposite happened; the industry experienced a demand boom, as companies needed to rework their IT systems to help their employees work from home. In some cases, there were more deals than people to deliver them and the companies went on a hiring spree. This was the time when ‘moonlighting’ — the practice of working formally for two companies — gained prominence.Freshers are typically scooped up from college campuses through physical interviews at the end of third year and they join once they finish their fourth year.But due to the pandemic, almost all hiring was remotely. At Infosys, the company’s freshers were interviewed on video calls and even phone calls in some cases with no in-person tests or interviews. Without those guardrails, the hiring process had a higher failure rate.This would have been discovered sooner if things had gone as expected but the demand wave that led to the hiring quickly ebbed, and IT companies were stuck having made thousands of offers to freshers to join but not having enough business to deploy them.Companies such as LTI Mindtree, Tech Mahindra and HCL Tech revoked some offers during the pandemic, while some others such as Infosys asked freshers to wait until the business improved.When Infosys resumed fresher hiring in 2024, it began by bringing in the pandemic batches, where the problem was lying hidden.“In a normal hiring process, this would not have happened,” said another person familiar with the experience. “It was so bad in some cases it felt like there were impersonations in the interview. In a face-to-face interview, the quality of talent we found simply would not have made the cut.”In an email to ET Prime, Infosys confirmed that it was seeing higher failure rates for trainees hired during the pandemic.“For a few batches that were hired during the pandemic, the assessment failure rates — despite providing additional training and multiple attempts of assessment — were comparatively higher. This may have been due to varied reasons including the possibility that many of them would have done a substantial portion of their engineering education remotely during the pandemic,” said Shaji Mathew, group chief human resources officer at Infosys, in response to questions from ET Prime.This is not a problem faced just by Infosys. ET Prime spoke to recruiters who agreed that students who studied during the pandemic were shortchanged in their skills as even their teachers needed to learn how to teach through remote tools, manage classes virtually, and teach effectively.“There has been a massive learning loss for these students, not just in domain skills, but in the soft skills you learn in college when you study collaboratively. The experience and knowledge of what you would expect was lower for the Covid batches than normal batches,” said Neeti Sharma, CEO of Teamlease Digital.Sharma added that these students would require a “roadmap to make them employable” which would include a learning-linked apprenticeship programme. Remote: More party than work?The Infosys imbroglio is just the latest issue facing IT services companies who deal with employees who want permanent remote working conditions. Even multinational corporations such as Google and Accenture have been treading carefully in bringing employees back to office.Tata Consultancy Services, which has tied variable pay to attendance, has a five-day-in-office policy. Other companies require either three days a week, or more based on client requirements. Infosys requires 10 days a month.But it doesn’t work across the board. There are differences between experienced hands who are soaked into a company’s culture and those who are just getting into the army of job seekers.“When you have a young workforce that is just starting, the kind of professionalism you need for remote work is not there,” said an executive with an IT services firm. “You could hear parties in the background when they are supposed to be on calls. It wasn’t working for clients.”Remote works for senior executives with independent roles and established teams but not for freshers who need to learn company culture and collaborate with each other, he said.Remote work was also creating problems down the line. One IT services company found a high rate of rejection for its own employees applying for managerial postings on its internal job posting.“We went to the hiring panel and asked what was going on because we needed to promote and retain people, and we were rejecting our own employees,” said a software executive. “The hiring panel pointed out that employees hadn’t come to the office once in three years and lacked interpersonal skills. You build that in the office. It doesn’t happen over calls.”While Infosys and others may grapple with the problems that were created during Covid, there is some relief from the state authorities over what has been hobbling the company.So far, the company has been cleared by the Karnataka Labour Department. And last week, the Board of Practical Training, which comes under the Union ministry for human resources and skill development and has oversight over Infosys’ training programme as part of the Apprenticeship Act, dismissed fresher allegations against the company.ET Prime reviewed the mail by the Board of Practical Training. Infosys’ Mathew confirmed that the company had been cleared by both the labour ministry and the Board of Practical Training.For Infosys, other IT companies and students forced to learn online, clearly Covid is still causing harm.