Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has halted the onboarding of lateral hires for at least three months. This comes weeks after at least 200 persons were recruited as lateral employees in cities including Bengaluru, Pune, Kochi, and Delhi NCR by the company. Lateral hire refers to hiring people who are already employed in a similar position in another company. TCS had conducted interviews and recruited as many as 200 persons with experiences between 2 years to 15 years, earlier this year.
According to a Moneycontrol report, initially, the recruits were hired between January and April, and their date of joining was postponed by a month multiple times. Subsequently, in July, the talent acquisition team of the company sent an email, saying that onboarding across TCS has been halted according to a corporate instruction. A few others got an email saying that their date of joining has been pushed to October second week, and the new date can be accessed through the company’s portal.
Employees allege that they were not informed of the decision up until they received the email, and many of them have served their notice period in their previous company and are looking for another job. Meanwhile, the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES) has written a letter to the Minister for Labour and Employment Bhupender Yadav seeking his intervention in the matter. Stating that the employees are severely affected, they alleged that the delay in onboarding was informed to them only at the last minute causing additional hardship.
According to an Outlook report, the union has sought three reliefs from the labour ministry, including a direction to TCS to pay the affected employees their full salaries for the period of delay and find an alternative employment opportunity for the affected employees.
The TCS Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), addressing a press conference, had said that the company had honoured all the job offers so far and will continue to do so. “Certain delays are due to the environment we are in and project delays,” he had said.
The company had recently sacked 12 workers associated with TCS, who allegedly received bribes to provide jobs, for “violating ethical conduct”. The chairperson of the company N Chandrasekaran said that the company is looking into “what the weaknesses are, and will completely tidy the process to ensure that they do not have such incidents.”