Infrastructure giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T) plans to hire 1,500 people this year, just like previous years, a top company official said, the company’s manpower strength stood at 42,924 as on March 31, 2018 as compared to 41,466 as at March 31, 2017. On an average, they hire close to 1,500 people across functions every year and see no discontinuity in this practice unless business dynamics change drastically, said a senior employee at Larsen and Toubro, as reported PTI.
He added that L&T’s employee attrition rate of around 5 percent was among the lowest in the industry. L&T recently made a hostile takeover bid for mid-sized IT services firm Mindtree. However, the company’s founders have resisted the unsolicited acquisition bid, citing differences in corporate culture and other factors.
Elaborating on L&T’s HR practices, he said, there is a greater emphasis on ensuring women are the target audience and policies must be framed to initiate their career growth. Women employees are not just deployed in IT and finance roles, but are also present in core engineering jobs like heavy engineering shops, construction projects, and defense engineering projects, he said.
There have been speculations on job cuts as the company opts for digitisation, however, L&T says that there have been no lay-offs and the exits were limited to reasons of non-performance. The company’s Leadership Development Academy (LDA) at Lonavala has been set up for learning interventions, he said, adding that an artificial intelligence-driven digitalized platform, called ATLNext, caters to the learning needs of its workforce.
Business magazine Forbes had ranked L&T at number 22 among the ‘World’s Best Employers’ for 2018. The list, based on Forbes’ Global 2000 rankings of publicly traded companies in 60 countries, making it the highest-ranked Indian firm across all sectors. L&T has acquired Cafe Coffee Day owner V G Siddhartha’s 20.32 per cent stake in Mindtree and has also placed an order with brokers to pick up another 15 percent shares from the open market. Apart from that, an open offer has been made to buy over 5.13 crore shares, amounting to about 31 percent stake.
