Bangalore: India's largest Information Technology [IT] service provider, TCS has offered 43,600 engineering freshers for the year 2012-13 in the campus recruitment process. This offering is considered to be more than 37,800 offers that were made for this year.

The company has also clarified that the final hiring target for 2012-13 will be announced by the end of March this year and the offers were made only for the engineering students at Indian campuses. The hiring target will also include hiring from foreign campuses and lateral offers, Shivani Shinde from the Business Standard reports.

The hiring trend represents the demand outlook for the next financial year when the IT budgets are under pressure. For the year 2011-12, the company will end up hiring around 66,000 employees as in the last three quarters it has already added 51,000 employees and will add another 15,000 during the January-March quarter, of which 9,000 will be freshers. In the third quarter the ratio of fresher to laterals was 70:30.

The company has changed its strategy of applying for visas to the U.S., which is its majority market. Due to higher rejection rates, it has reduced the dependency on the L-1 visa category and has increased applications for H1-B visas.

Ajoy Mukherjee, Executive Vice-President and Head, Global Human Resources, TCS has informed that the H1-B visa application submission begins from April 1^st and goes on till October, reports the article. He also told that the company had applied for 4,500 H1-B visas and in that some of them are already issued in October and are being used. He has told that the number of visas required for the year 2012 is yet to be decided.

The recent decision of the U.S. embassy to consolidate its L-1 visa process at its Chennai centre is another reason for TCS to opt for more H1-B visas. The company has witnessed increased rejection rate as high as 30 percent in the L category. According to Mukherjee, it is the application of these norms that is leading to the rejection even though the guidelines are the same. He also said TCS is hiring people to their Cincinnati, Dallas, Milford and Phoenix centers. The company has around 1,200 people on TCS rolls and about 2,000 business associates and they have made 120 campus offers so far, of which 70 have been accepted.