Cognizant Attrition Reaches Record Levels
Attrition rates in Cognizant have risen to 18-24 percent over the past nine quarters. In the latest quarter, the company’s attrition rose to 21 percent, translating to about 15,600 employees leaving the firm. It was 19 percent in the preceding quarter and was 24 percent in Q2 of last year.
Even as Cognizant has made offers to 28,000 campus hires for on-boarding this year, the company’s attrition rate continues to stay very high, compared to those of its Indian peers. In the latest quarter, TCS had attrition rate of just 7.2%, HCL had 9.9%, Wipro had 12.1%, and Infosys had 15% attrition.
Cognizant is seeing increasing attrition despite a series of measures to attract and retain talent. The management said in some cases, commercial opportunities were forgone due to an inability to source talent.
According to a TOI report, Cognizant has set up a $30 million corpus, dubbed as a retention fund, to hold back top performers and digitally-skilled employees. The corpus is used when such employees receive offers from competitors.
To woo talent, the company has shifted to a quarterly promotion cycle for billable associates, job rotations, affected fresh salary increases/promotions for hot skills and critical positions. It has expanded its campus recruitment drive from 100 accredited institutes to 300 colleges, including some in tier-2 cities.
Zomato to Invest $100 Million in Grofers
After a failed attempt at acquiring Grofers, Zomato is now looking to invest around $100 million in the grocery e-tailing company to combine forces and fight the big grocery fight.
IPO-bound Zomato has ambitions in the grocery sector, and would like to partner with Grofers which already is clocking 110% annual growth, as per the company. The idea is to use Zomato’s delivery fleet of 150,000 to facilitate Grofers’ grocery commerce capabilities.
After experimenting with grocery deliveries at the start of the pandemic, Zomato said it would halt the service. Zomato Market, as it was called, had tied up with Grofers to sell food products and essentials. But as food delivery numbers improved due to a demand surge in the second half of last year, groceries took a backseat for Zomato.
But with Swiggy continuing to push its quick grocery delivery service Instamart and daily essentials delivery platform Supr Daily in its attempt to diversify offerings, Zomato too is now sensing an opportunity it doesn’t want to miss.
Grofers — which was looking to list on the tech-heavy Nasdaq in the US— is expected to scrap the IPO plan and continue to remain private.
Govt Shuts Down Real-Time Data on CoWin to Thwart Techies
The government is shutting off access to real-time data on vaccine slots available on its CoWin platform. It did so after it found that some technology professionals had written code to exploit the portal’s transparency and give them the edge over others on booking vaccination slots.
The CoWin portal uses open application programming interfaces or APIs that allows two programmes to talk to each other and share information. These were made public so that private hospitals could integrate them into their systems to facilitate faster vaccination.
Some programmers have even set up websites and Telegram channels to send alerts to people looking for vaccination slots, resulting in hundreds of slots being booked in minutes.
