MUMBAI: French IT major Capgemini on Thursday said its employee base here will touch 1 lakh by April-end and despite the concerns on protectionism, it will continue to recruit more talent in the country with a bias towards hiring more freshers.

"We will be touching 1 lakh in a few weeks' time...We are at 98,800 employees right now and we shall touch 1 lakh by April-end," Capgemini India Chief Executive Srinivas Kandula told PTI here.

The company is the third largest employer among foreign IT companies in the country, after Accenture and IBM, and will continue to add employees here in the future as well, he said.

Kandula said there would be a greater focus on hiring freshers who can be taught necessary skills in a rapidly- changing technology world in the future, and added the number of offers as well as the campuses it visited has gone up.

Hiring freshers doesn't entail any "unlearning" which the lateral hires have to do, he said.

Capgemini looks at Asia's third largest economy primarily as a source of talent, and the cost advantages which it offers are secondary, he said.

Till now, the company, present in nine cities with the head office on Mumbai's outskirts, focused on making lateral hirings. It recruited 33,000 people at a gross level, including freshers and laterals, in 2016.

Its attrition rate has come down to 20 per cent, Kandula said.

With fears of a shift to protectionism, Kandula said the company will be unaffected by it and any slowdown in hiring will only be because of increased automation.

He said the company always hires locally in each of the geographies it is present and therefore, has a low reliance on H1-B visas, he said, adding high-skill workers are welcome even under the new visa law being proposed in the US.

Kandula said there is an "over reaction" to the visa concerns as some regulations are already in place, and stressed the shift to digital, automation and cloud are the bigger threats to the IT sector.

With Nasscom saying that 1.5 million people will have to be re-skilled to serve the changing market dynamics, Kandula said 30 per cent of its staff is already trained in new technologies and it is aiming to progressively take this number up to 50 per cent over the next two-three years.

Kandula said the integration of the erstwhile I-Gate business, which merged with 25,000 employees, has been completed successfully and there has been no attrition of either clients or employees as a result of it.

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