India's biggest IT services companies are sending two seemingly contradictory signals at once: overall headcount keeps shrinking, while fresher hiring commitments for FY27 are holding up or even rising slightly. Taken together, the numbers point to a sector that has stopped growing broadly but is still actively recruiting at the entry level — just more selectively than it used to.
Infosys CFO Jayesh Sanghrajka confirmed the company will hire at least 20,000 freshers in FY27, even after the company's overall headcount fell by 8,440 in the March quarter to 3,28,594 — a drop the company attributed to seasonal softness and lower project volumes rather than a pullback on entry-level hiring specifically.
TCS CEO K Krithivasan said in April that the company had made 25,000 offers to freshers for FY27, while noting that how many of those convert to actual onboarding will depend on client demand through the year. Cognizant CFO Jatin Dalal has said the company plans to hire 24,000 to 25,000 graduates in calendar 2026 — roughly 20% more than the approximately 20,000 it hired in 2025.
Add the three up and you get a combined fresher hiring plan of roughly 69,000 to 70,000 people for the year, even as net headcount across the industry has been close to flat or negative.
Fresher hiring and net headcount measure different things. Net headcount reflects attrition, project ramp-downs, and lateral hiring freezes all at once; fresher hiring is a specific pipeline tied to campus recruitment cycles that companies plan a year or more in advance and are reluctant to disrupt, both for cost reasons — freshers are cheaper than lateral hires — and for long-term talent pipeline reasons. A company can be shedding mid-level and senior staff through attrition and project closures while still bringing in a steady, planned intake of graduates.
The entry-level door at India's largest IT services firms hasn't closed, but it has narrowed in a specific way: offers are increasingly tied to business demand rather than being issued as a flat annual quota, which is why TCS explicitly flagged that its 25,000 figure could move depending on how the year plays out. If you have an offer, don't assume the onboarding date is fixed regardless of market conditions — stay in touch with your recruiter and have a backup plan for the gap between offer and joining. If you're still applying, these companies' campus hiring drives remain the highest-volume entry point into Indian IT, but expect more technical screening and longer gaps between offer and onboarding than in previous hiring cycles.
For more context on the hiring slowdown at the lateral and mid-level, Outlook Business has more detail on Infosys's FY27 numbers.