2,500 IT freshers to be given pink slips for failing screening test: Report

The screening tests may also get more stringent as the firms are under pressure to honour campus offers but are already overstaffed

Indian IT companies may lay off about 2,500 recent recruits for failing the internal assessment tests, a report by Mint said. The layoffs will be based on screening tests that generally take place within a year of a recruit's joining to assess whether they will match the client's needs. 

 

Experts quoted in the report added that the layoffs might also be due to overhiring during the pandemic.

 

"We expect around 2,500-plus freshers to be removed from these companies due to poor performance, post-training," Anshuman Das, chief executive and co-founder of Careernet, a talent solutions provider, told Mint. 

 

According to Das, around 1 per cent of the total hires fail to clear the screening tests every year. In 2022-23 (FY23), around 2 per cent of 200,000 recruits may fail the tests. 

 

The screening tests may also get more stringent as the firms are pressured to honour campus offers but are already overstaffed. The quality of the campus recruits has also been questioned by many. 

 

"Many of the major IT companies faced excess demand in the market due to a boost in digital deals across sectors of clients, which led them to hire aggressively amid a war for talent. It is highly likely that such hiring would have led to an unwitting drop in standards, which mandates a natural demand for a correction at some point in time," Chirajeet Sengupta, partner of global technology services at consulting firm Everest Group told Mint. 

 

Reports recently said that Infosys might let go of 600 freshers who failed their screening tests. Wipro will also reportedly let go of 452 freshers. 

 

The layoffs are most likely to have more impact on the junior workforce. 

 

"What we can expect is to see the bottom of the employee pyramid facing a greater threat of holding on to their jobs. This is an indicator that there are concerning headwinds in the coming quarters, even though the overall order execution pipeline is robust at the moment," Akshara Bassi, an analyst for global cloud and servers at market researcher Counterpoint India added.