While India's IT services industry as a whole has nearly stopped net hiring, Infosys has been moving in the opposite direction. The company hired 12,000 entry-level graduates in the first half of its 2026 fiscal year, putting it on track to meet its stated goal of recruiting 20,000 freshers by March, according to Storyboard18. Infosys also added a net 8,203 employees in the three months through September — its fifth consecutive quarter of headcount growth, per People Matters, even as several of its peers shed staff over the same period.

The contrast with the rest of the sector is stark: across TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Tech Mahindra combined, net headcount grew by just 17 employees over the first nine months of FY26. Infosys's expansion is effectively offsetting contraction elsewhere in the sector's aggregate numbers.

Why Infosys is bucking the trend

Infosys's hiring push is tied to steady profit growth — the company's profit climbed 13% alongside the fresher intake — and to rebuilding bench strength after several lean years of cautious hiring during the post-pandemic slowdown. Bringing in large graduate cohorts now lets the company staff upcoming project pipelines, including AI and cloud transformation work, at lower cost than lateral hiring.

It isn't the only one hiring

Infosys isn't acting entirely alone. HCLTech has committed to hiring 10,000 candidates, and Wipro has said it will bring in 2,500 to 3,000 students per quarter from campuses. Taken together, these commitments suggest campus hiring hasn't disappeared industry-wide — it has concentrated in specific companies and specific quarters, rather than spreading evenly across the sector the way it once did.

What this means if you're job hunting

• Track company-level data, not just sector headlines. "IT hiring is frozen" is true in aggregate but hides real variation between individual employers.
• Campus and early-career cycles are a leading indicator. A company visibly hiring freshers now is often a company whose project pipeline is growing, which tends to create lateral and experienced openings a few quarters later.
• Don't rule out a company because the sector headline is bad. Apply based on that specific employer's recent earnings calls and hiring announcements, not on sector-wide averages.

For engineering graduates and early-career candidates especially, the lesson is that hiring freezes are rarely uniform. Knowing which companies are actually growing their headcount — and why — is more useful than reacting to a single discouraging sector statistic.

It's also worth watching what happens over the next two quarters. If Infosys's graduate intake and profit growth hold up while peers continue trimming headcount, it will say something about which strategy — aggressive fresher hiring tied to AI and cloud project pipelines versus cautious lateral-only hiring — actually wins out as the sector adjusts to slower discretionary IT spending. For now, the clearest signal for job seekers is that company-specific earnings calls and hiring announcements are a far better guide to where openings exist than any single industry-wide headline.