IT giant Cognizant has announced that it will be hiring 20,000 freshers in 2025. The move is meant to shape the company’s talent pyramid to support managed services and AI-led software development.
“The 20,000 freshers will now shape our pyramid because we are now getting a lot of managed services work. So, that will start to accelerate our headcount,” Ravi Kumar S, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Cognizant, stated after announcing the March quarter results. “Now that organic growth has come back, it’s a good time to re-baseline the pyramid.”
As per the CEO, Cognizant wants to hire more freshers to strengthen its talent pyramid, especially in light of the increasing number of managed services projects in the past two years. Kumar added that the company will be focusing on hiring freshers, increasing productivity through AI, and improving utilisation, to manage human capital costs effectively.
“As we stated at our Investor Day, we are hiring 20,000 freshers as part of our strategy, which is more than double what we did last year,” Kumar explained, adding, “But it also comes equally with an overhead of carrying a higher bench at a lower cost and actually offshore.”
Kumar also explained that 14,000 of Cognizant’s former employees have rejoined the company, and there are 10,000 more who might make the same move. A major bulk recruiter in India, Cognizant is focused on increasing the AI capabilities of its workforce.
“…with amplifying talent, we are strengthening our talent pipeline with skills needed for the AI era. As you heard us talk about during the Investor Day, we are upskilling our workforce at scale, leveraging AI to meet demand faster and identifying talent pools to address new areas unlocked by AI,” Kumar said.
Cognizant will continue its specialised hiring from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) for its power programmers and full-stack developer roles. They will also focus on expanding in the Global Capability Centre (GCC) space to focus on “mega deals.”