IBM, Accenture, Capgemini lock up employees to stop attrition

Major IT companies in India are thinking hard about how they can retain employees - as the high attrition rate is back to a serious concern. Bigwigs like IBM, Accenture, Cognizant, and Capgemini are adopting a strategy of asking employees to serve a three months notice period. This policy has historically been taken up by these companies before to address attrition issues.

An IBM insider says, "This is like a trap. No company would hire an employee who has to serve three months notice period in the last company. This way, the present employer will end up retaining employees and attrition rate would be addressed to certain extent."

It gets easier for employees to jump from one company to the other with a one month notice period.

An employee working with Accenture says, "No employee would even think of changing companies as it might get little tricky for them. If anyone gets an offer letter with a condition of 1-2 months of notice period, it's fine. But failing that, the employee might lose on both ends. So, this is a well-thought out strategy but prospective candidates will definitely back out if such conditions are laid out in the offer letter."

Placement consultancies and poachers will find it tough as the only option left with them would be to buy-out the notice period and pay a hefty amount equalling the notice period salary. It will put the boot into Sapient which has based its entire recruitment drive and marketing on poaching.

Ranjay Sharma, a multinational recruitment firm executive, thinks this policy might have a backlash on these companies as they are the biggest poachers themselves.

Sharma says, "It's a cycle. If A company wants to poach from B company, A wouldn't be concerned with attrition of the employees poached but it will realize when C company would do the same with them."

The only good outcome that this policy indicates is that Indian IT professionals are back in demand.