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New Delhi, Sept. 24 (pti): Tata Consultancy Services (tcs) today said it would hire up to 5,000 employees from the northern region this fiscal, and 70 per cent of the recruitment would come from smaller cities.

“The company is set to hire 3,000 at the trainee level and 2,000 positions will be filled through lateral hirings in the northern region. We plan to hire over 70 per cent candidates from Tier II and Tier III cities because of quality talent in these places which we don't want to miss out on,” said Thomas Simon, vice-president (human resources) of TCS.

The company believed the knowledge base of these candidates was as strong as their counterparts in big cities. However, imparting training in language, soft skills and etiquette was essential to give them a finishing touch, he said.

The compensation and rewards for employees across centres would be similar, Simon added.

Trainees need to have a minimum 60 per cent score in all the degrees attained. For experienced professionals, the cut-off has been kept at 50 per cent, Simon said.

Hirings would be taken up for positions based in the national capital region except Lucknow. Experienced professionals will be hired for pre-mapped positions, while freshers will be sent to Thiruvananthapuram for training.

The company had earlier said it planned to ramp up the headcount by 32,000 across India this fiscal.

tcs has witnessed an attrition rate of 11.5 per cent, with 11 per cent in IT services and 16.7 per cent in the bpo segment, in the first quarter of the current fiscal ended June 30.

“We managed to check the attrition figures this year,” Simon said.

The employee strength of the company was 94,902, at the end of the first quarter. There was a gross addition of 8,706 employees, of which 2,898 were trainees and 4,795 experienced professionals in India and 1,013 employees in overseas subsidiaries and branches. The net addition in the quarter was 5,512 employees.

The company is expanding the talent pool beyond engineering students through its Ignite programme aimed at science graduates.

Tcs recently completed a seven-month on-the-job training programme for the graduates.

It also plans to reinforce its new image through increased branding activities, newsletters, blogs, the campus portal and interactions with training and placement officers and institutional heads of technical institutes through its existing forums — Sparsh and Sangam.