HCLTech adds 6,450 staff in Q2, plans 11,000 freshers with pay up to Rs 18 lakh

HCLTech added a net 6,450 employees in the July-September quarter, its biggest quarterly increase in 16 quarters, and most of the new joiners were fresh graduates. The Noida-based IT services company reported the figures with its second-quarter results for 2026-27 on Monday, October 12, 2026. Headcount stood at 230,339 on September 30. The company's chief people officer, Ram Sundararajan, has since said HCLTech has finished its campus hiring round for the year and expects to take in roughly 11,000 freshers in 2026-27, about the same as last year, with starting pay ranging up to Rs 18 lakh a year for its top engineering cadre.

For engineering graduates, the September quarter numbers are the clearest sign in some time that at least one of India's largest IT employers is bringing campus recruits on board at scale again. Over the previous year HCLTech's fresher intake had been thin: 2,852 in the December quarter and 1,712 in the March quarter, before falling to 1,056 in the June quarter. The jump to 6,136 means many students holding earlier offers are now starting work.

The more important change is in how HCLTech is sorting the graduates it hires. The company says it has moved to skills-based hiring built around technologies its clients are asking for. At the top sits the Elite Engineer cadre, which draws mainly from the IITs and NITs. Its recruits are matched to frontier areas: semiconductors and silicon, artificial intelligence, data engineering, physical AI and robotics, and quantum computing. Pay for this group starts at Rs 18 lakh a year. Below it is the Primus Campus programme, a set of partner colleges that get hiring priority. Freshers from these colleges go into one of three tiers, called Ascend, Momentum and Polaris, with pay reported to range from about Rs 4.5 lakh to a top of Rs 10 lakh a year.

That spread, from about Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 18 lakh for a first job, shows how far fresher pay inside one company now depends on skills. On the results call, Sundararajan said the company expects these elite engineers to move into its forward-deployed engineering teams within two to three years. Those are engineers who work directly with clients to build and run AI systems inside the client's business.

HCLTech's numbers also stand out against its peers this results season. Tata Consultancy Services added 4,258 people in the quarter and said it onboarded 10,000 freshers, and Tech Mahindra added 5,446. Wipro went the other way, reporting a fall of 6,716 in headcount, its largest drop in 12 quarters, though it said fresher hiring would rise.

Short-term: Graduates holding HCLTech offers from the 2026 campus round are likely to see joining dates move forward through the rest of the financial year as the company works towards its target of about 11,000 freshers.

Long-term: If other large IT firms follow HCLTech's tiered model, a fresher's starting salary will depend less on which company hires them and more on which skill track they qualify for. Colleges and students may respond by putting more weight on AI, data, semiconductor and robotics coursework and on project work that proves those skills.

Who is affected: Final-year engineering and computer science students, especially at IITs, NITs and the colleges in HCLTech's Primus partner list; recent graduates waiting to join after receiving offers; and rival IT services companies competing for the same specialised talent.

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