Infosys has postponed online and in-person hiring assessments for more than 20,000 job applicants after detecting multiple instances of impersonation and assessment malpractice during its recruitment process. India’s second-largest IT services company informed affected candidates by email that the scheduled tests had been deferred, and that revised dates will follow once a new plan is finalised.
The deferment affects candidates applying for Infosys’ Specialist Programmer (Trainee) and Digital Specialist Engineer (Trainee) roles. The company said it uncovered attempts by some applicants to manipulate the evaluation, and paused the scheduled assessments while it tightens safeguards. Both the online hiring examination and the in-person evaluation for these roles have been put on hold.
Infosys has introduced additional controls and verification checks to protect the integrity of its assessments. The company stressed that the disruption does not change its broader hiring plans.
“We remain focused on identifying, hiring and nurturing top talent,” Infosys told The Times of India.
The episode lands at the heart of one of the largest campus recruitment programmes in Indian tech. Infosys added more than 20,000 freshers during FY26 and has lined up a similar intake for FY27, recruiting across roughly 300 to 400 colleges a year. At that volume, even isolated cases of cheating can ripple through hiring schedules and leave thousands of candidates waiting on new dates.
The malpractice itself reflects a problem that has followed the shift to digital hiring. Over the past year, Infosys moved from a fully virtual recruitment model to a hybrid one that pairs online tests with in-person evaluation.
The company has previously flagged the weak points of remote hiring: fake candidate profiles, identity and authentication risks, technical glitches during assessments, and the difficulty of building rapport with applicants over a screen. Impersonation, where a stand-in takes the test for the actual candidate, is the sharpest version of that authentication gap.
Much of the early screening runs through Springboard, Infosys’ digital learning and skilling platform, which the company says has reached more than 15 million people, including employees, students, educators, and client teams. A pipeline operating at that scale makes verification both harder and more important, since a single weak checkpoint can be exploited across thousands of test slots.
