Do IT companies still hire freshers in 2026? What the numbers say, and how to get in from Kolkata

Short answer: yes. TCS said in April 2026 that it had made 25,000 fresher offers for the current financial year, and Infosys said it expects to take in at least 20,000. India's technology industry added about 1.35 lakh people in the year to March 2026. But the intake is far smaller than in the boom years, it is selective, joining dates slip, and the openings that are growing ask for a skill you can demonstrate rather than a degree you can show. This article lays out the published numbers, what changed, and what a fresher in Kolkata should do between now and March.

Three headlines that seem to contradict each other

If you follow the news you have seen all three of these in the same month. Each one is true.

"The big IT companies are shrinking." They are. HFS Research reported in July 2026 that the five largest Indian IT services companies, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra, reduced their combined workforce by 6,981 people in FY26, reversing a net addition of 12,718 the year before. TCS alone was smaller by 23,460. In the same year, by Nasscom's count, the industry as a whole grew by 1.35 lakh people to 59.5 lakh. Both numbers are correct, and together they tell you where the growth went: not into the five names everyone at home recognises, but into mid-sized firms, global capability centres and the technology teams of companies that are not "IT companies" at all.

"Freshers are still being hired in tens of thousands." Also true. TCS hired more than 44,000 freshers in FY26 and has made 25,000 offers for FY27. Infosys took in more than 20,000 in FY26 and expects at least 20,000 again. But an offer is not a joining date. In March 2026 more than 1,000 engineering graduates from the 2025 batch were still waiting for formal offer letters from Tech Mahindra, close to a year after being selected. In January, more than 250 Wipro selects who had received letters of intent around May 2025 had still not been onboarded, and an employee union asked the labour ministry to step in. Offers now follow client demand, and client demand moves.

"Tech openings are at an 18-month high." True again. Xpheno, a staffing firm that counts active job advertisements, put total technology openings at 117,000 for September 2026, with 57,000 of them in IT services, the highest since February 2025. Read one line further, though: mid-senior and senior roles make up nearly 60 percent of that demand, and the entry-level openings that remain go to people with what the report calls job-ready digital capabilities.

So the honest answer to the question in the title is yes, but the door has moved, and it is narrower than the one your seniors walked through. The useful question is no longer whether companies hire freshers. It is which freshers, and for what.

What actually changed

Three things, and none of them is going back.

1. The company no longer wants to pay for your first nine months. TCS's chief executive said in April that a fresher takes about nine months of training before being deployed on a project, while an experienced hire contributes from the first day. In the years when clients were spending freely, companies could carry that cost for tens of thousands of people at a time. Now they carry it for fewer, and they choose the ones who arrive with part of that training already done. This is why every large recruiter now runs tiered entry tracks, with the better-paid ones gated by a skills test.

2. AI took the bottom rung. The traditional first year of an IT career was watching, documenting, running routine tickets and writing small pieces of code under supervision. That is exactly the work AI tools now absorb. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that entry-level roles most exposed to AI are now seven times more likely to require what used to be senior-level skills: judgement, leadership and working directly with people. The first rung did not disappear. It rose.

3. The hiring moved out of the IT services companies. Nasscom's own line is that jobs grew 2.3 percent in FY26 while revenue grew 6.1 percent: more work, done by fewer new people. Adecco India expects the technology job market to grow another 12 to 15 percent in 2026, and says nearly 38 percent of technology-driven hiring now comes from banking and financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics. Quess Corp's workforce report for 2025 found that people with four to ten years of experience took 65 percent of IT hiring, and entry-level roles were 15 percent of demand. The jobs exist. They are spread across thousands of employers instead of five, and most of them are never announced on a college notice board.

Where the openings are

Here is the part of the picture that works in a fresher's favour, if you act on it.

TeamLease Digital analysed 37,000 technology roles in September 2026 and reported the gap between demand and available talent, skill family by skill family:

Only about 16 percent of IT professionals hold AI skills, by the same report. Nasscom says that of the 59.5 lakh people in the industry, about 20 lakh have been upskilled in AI, and up to 3 lakh on advanced AI. Globally, PwC found that jobs requiring specific AI skills grew about eight times as fast as the overall job market, 69 percent against 9 percent, and that workers with AI skills earned a 62 percent wage premium in 2026, up from 57 percent a year earlier.

The same TeamLease Digital report put starting pay for people with zero to two years of experience at about Rs 11.2 lakh a year for a generative AI developer, Rs 9.1 lakh for a data engineer and Rs 5.2 lakh for a technical support engineer. These are national market figures, not our placement data, and in Kolkata the lower end of each band is the realistic one. The point is the spread: the skill decides the band far more than the degree does.

Put the two halves together. A fresher with only a degree is competing with lakhs of other freshers for an intake that has shrunk. A fresher who can demonstrate one in-demand specialisation, in cloud, databases, data or AI, is competing in a market that is short of people. The cost of moving from the first group to the second is a few months of structured work. That is the whole opportunity.

The Kolkata reality

Kolkata is not Bengaluru or Hyderabad. The mass campus drives you read about are run at a limited set of colleges, and they take a handful from each. In our experience, most students in and around Kolkata, from general-degree colleges and engineering colleges alike, were always going to get their first IT job off campus. In 2026 that is true for most of the country too.

The students we place get in through the off-campus route: direct applications, referrals from the companies that hire from us, and the interviews we arrange once a student is ready. Deb Kumar Payra was a B.Com graduate behind a textile shop counter. Rishabh Sinha was a telecom engineer. Deepa Dhiman and Amarjeet Prajapati had their own detours. Arindam, a B.Sc. with a printing diploma who was selling for ₹17,000 a month, received an offer from a Tata Group company in October 2026. None of them came through a campus placement cell, and their stories are told in full here.

Two alumni who joined us as freshers put it this way:

"I was really worried about my career, and then I made one of the best decisions: to join SHA. This place shaped my career on the right track. From hands-on training to mock interviews to live projects, they're doing a great job for people like us. You just need to be serious." — Souvik Mitra, B.Tech IT 2018, now at Infosys, via Google

"SHA is not a typical institute like others; they provide us with live industrial project which will help anyone get a decent job. All faculty members have many years of experience. The main thing is that they will hold your hand till you get a job." — Sagnik Chakraborty, B.Tech fresher, now a data scientist, via Google

And if you want to see what "a degree is not enough" looks like from the inside, watch Souvik Ghosh's interview below: a computer science graduate who spent five years without a job, and what changed.

A six-month plan for the 2025, 2026 and 2027 batches

Whether you graduated last year and are still searching, hold an offer that has not turned into a joining date, or are in your final year watching the drives thin out, the plan is the same. It follows the seven-stop roadmap we use with every student.

Month 1: choose one direction, then stop choosing. Cloud, databases, data or AI. The roadmap page lays out the four directions, and if yours is cloud, our guide to choosing between AWS, Azure and OCI settles the next question. The mistake most freshers make is to start four free courses and finish none. Pick one, and let the job postings for that role, not a video feed, decide what you study.

Months 1 to 2: fundamentals you can be tested on. Linux, networking, SQL and one scripting language. If your degree was not computer science, or it was and nobody made you practise, this is what the IT Foundation Program exists for. Every tiered fresher track at the large recruiters tests exactly these.

Months 3 to 5: one specialisation, with proof. Build things an interviewer can open. A cloud student should have real deployments in a free-tier account; our two OCI Object Storage labs are the kind of thing we mean, written so that anyone can do them. A database student should have a schema they designed, loaded, tuned and backed up. A data student should have a dataset nobody assigned, cleaned and analysed end to end. Three such pieces of work are worth more than ten certificates.

Month 6: interviews, and the job search as a weekly habit. Mock interviews until the answers come without rehearsal. A résumé that leads with the projects, not the degree. Then apply every week, off campus: job portals, LinkedIn, referrals, and the hiring partners of wherever you trained. Treat the search as a course in itself, with hours on the timetable.

Throughout: do not sit idle. If you have no job now, take any job while you train. Sales, support, the family business, anything. Income, discipline and momentum all compound, and the gap on your résumé stays short. We said this in our reality check for people being talked out of IT, and it applies with more force here.

If your joining date has slipped. Do not give up the offer in frustration, and do not sit and wait for it either. Keep in touch with the recruiter in writing every few weeks, and use the months to build the specialisation above. When onboarding resumes, the people called first are the ones who can show they used the time. If it never resumes, you have a second door you did not have before.

What it takes

In plain terms: about seven months of structured, hands-on training for most people who start from zero, with the fundamentals first, then one specialisation, then interview preparation. The roadmap shows each month and what you can show for it. Batches run for both freshers and working people, with evening and weekend options. There are two ways to join, and the current starting fees are in the Fees section of the Courses page. Placement assistance continues until you are hired, as long as you stay engaged: attend the sessions, finish the projects and appear for the interviews we arrange.

The first step is a free counselling call, where we look at your degree, your year and whatever offer or gap you are carrying, and tell you honestly which direction fits. Ask for the call here, or book a slot yourself. If a family conversation stands between you and starting, read our reality check first; if a gap is the worry, returning to IT after a career gap covers it.

Sources

• Nasscom, Strategic Review 2026, as reported by PTI and Business Today on 24 February 2026, quoting president Rajesh Nambiar: FY26 revenue up 6.1 percent to USD 315 billion; 1.35 lakh net additions, taking direct employees to 59.5 lakh; job growth 2.3 percent against revenue growth 6.1 percent; over 20 lakh employees upskilled in AI, up to 3 lakh on advanced AI.
• HFS Research, It's no country for freshers as IT firms revisit campus hiring playbook, 20 July 2026: the five largest IT services companies reduced their workforce by 6,981 in FY26 against net additions of 12,718 in FY25; TCS by 23,460.
• Business Today, 13 April 2026: TCS chief executive K Krithivasan on 25,000 fresher offers for FY27, more than 44,000 freshers hired in FY26, and about nine months of training before deployment.
• Outlook Business, 24 April 2026: Infosys chief financial officer Jayesh Sanghrajka on at least 20,000 freshers in FY27 and more than 20,000 in FY26; headcount down 8,440 in the March quarter to 3,28,594.
• People Matters, 13 March 2026: more than 1,000 engineering graduates from the 2025 batch awaiting formal offer letters from Tech Mahindra.
• Outlook Business, 19 January 2026: more than 250 Wipro selects with letters of intent from around May 2025 not yet onboarded; NITES asks the labour ministry to intervene.
• Xpheno, Active Tech Jobs Outlook for September 2026, as reported by People Matters (India IT services hiring hits 18-month high with 57,000 open roles in September): 117,000 active technology openings, 57,000 in IT services, the highest since February 2025; mid-senior and senior roles nearly 60 percent of demand.
• TeamLease Digital, as reported by IANS on 29 September 2026: talent gaps of 55 to 60 percent in cloud, about 53 percent in generative AI and 25 to 30 percent in cybersecurity; about 16 percent of IT professionals with AI skills; 37,000 roles analysed; starting pay at zero to two years of Rs 11.2 lakh (generative AI developer), Rs 9.1 lakh (data engineer) and Rs 5.2 lakh (technical support engineer).
• PwC, 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, 15 June 2026: a 62 percent wage premium for workers with AI skills, up from 57 percent; jobs requiring AI skills growing 69 percent against 9 percent for all jobs; entry-level roles most exposed to AI seven times more likely to require senior-level human skills.
• Quess Corp, IT Workforce Trends in India 2025, as reported in the Indian press on 22 and 23 December 2025: entry-level roles 15 percent of demand; professionals with four to ten years of experience 65 percent of hiring.
• Adecco India, as reported by IANS on 17 January 2026: the technology job market expected to grow 12 to 15 percent in 2026; BFSI, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics nearly 38 percent of technology-driven hiring.

Souvik Ghosh: B.Tech in Computer Science, no job for five years, then a software engineer role within months

A degree alone did not get Souvik a job for five years. Hear what changed once he trained with a structured plan and mock interviews.

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