Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has launched a nationwide hiring drive for experienced professionals, months after reducing its workforce and cutting jobs allegedly by forced resignations.
One of India’s largest IT service companies has scheduled a walk-in recruitment drive on 7 March across 10 cities, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Noida, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bhubaneswar, Kochi, and Nagpur, according to internal communications seen by Storyboard18.
The walk-in drive is focused on professionals with 4-12 years of experience in enterprise technology platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and WorkDay. TCS is also seeking engineers with skills in enterprise integration, digital process management, and cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernisation.
TCS has also introduced an internal referral programme for the walk-in drive, offering cash incentives to employees who recommend candidates who go on to join the company. The programme called “Bring Your Buddy-Special Bonanza” will run between 16 January and 31 March.
Under the scheme, employees could receive up to Rs 40,000 if a referral joins within 30 days of receiving the offer. The incentives decrease to Rs 30,000, Rs 20,000, and Rs 15,000, depending on how long the candidate takes to join.
In an internal message announcing the scheme, TCS said the initiative was designed to “accelerate hiring through trusted employee networks” and reward staff whose referrals successfully join the organisation.
The referral hiring push has come less than a year after TCS announced layoffs of its 2% of global workforce in July. The company’s data showed that TCS’s employee count, including post-attrition, fell by around 5.3% between the first and third quarters for the fiscal year 2026. As of December 31, TCS has 582,163 employees worldwide.
IT workers’ welfare body NITES (Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate) said the latest hiring reflects a shift toward recruiting specialists for high-value projects rather than large-scale entry-level hiring.
“This indicates that the company is prioritising revenue-generating and client-critical skill clusters that support large transformation deals, ERP upgrades, and digital integration programs. This indicates that the company is prioritising revenue-generating and client-critical skill clusters that support large transformation deals, ERP upgrades, and digital integration programs. It does not resemble entry-level scale hiring but rather targeted lateral acquisition aligned to specific business pipelines,” said advocate Harpreet Singh Saluja, who is also NITES president.
However, the recruitment drive has also prompted criticism from some current and former employees of TCS who claimed that they were pushed out of the company last year despite having similar skills.
Ex-TCS employees alleged that some professionals in mid-level grades were placed under pressure through performance improvement plans or reduced “bench” periods- the time an employee can remain without being assigned to a project- making it harder for them to stay within the company.
One former employee said he had been working at an overseas client location before a short medical absence resulted in disciplinary action that ultimately led him to resign.
“They made certain charges, calling it uninformed absenteeism, and created a situation that forced me to resign,” he said.
Another former employee, Vidya Vasudevan, who joined TCS’s BPO division in 2015, said she moved into IT work after acquiring technical skills but claimed her role reclassification and pay structure remained unchanged.
“They are utilising BPO people with SQL and Python skills to get IT work done at lower packages,” she alleged, adding that she had spent more than a decade at the BPO-2 level without earning a single promotion.
TCS declined to comment when contacted by Storyboard18.
The development underscores the tension within the IT services industry as companies seek specialised talent while simultaneously undertaking a restructuring drive that has resulted in large-scale workforce reductions.