- Cognizant plans to hire 24,000-25,000 freshers in 2026, a 20% increase from 2025
- The company aims to shift high-value tech expertise to entry-level staff using AI
- Cognizant's 2025 revenue grew 6.4%, workforce increased 4%, boosting revenue per employee
IT services major Cognizant on Wednesday said it aims to hire about 24,000-25,000 freshers in 2026 as part of its strategy to expand "bottom of the pyramid" workforce.
The hiring target represents an increase of approximately 20 per cent over its 2025 intake, where the company onboarded close to 20,000 graduates.
During the company's Q4 2025 earnings call, Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S said the company is focused on a "broader pyramid" strategy, shifting high-value tech expertise to entry-level employees through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He noted the non-linearity of revenue and margins, and said the company is decoupling revenue growth from headcount growth. For 2025, revenues grew by 6.4 per cent (in constant currency) while the workforce only increased by 4 per cent, resulting in a 5 per cent increase in revenue per person.
"We are hiring more school graduates. In 2025, we hired more school graduates than in 2024, and in 2026, we are planning to hire more school graduates than in 2025. The idea is to hand this expertise on the fingertips of people at the bottom, and drift that value down to actually create not only significant non-linearity but broader pyramid early careers in our journey," Kumar said.
Of the 20,000 graduates hired in 2025, the company said 16,000 are already "in production" working on client projects, while the remaining 4,000 are currently undergoing training.
"This year we plan to increase this by an order of magnitude, about 20 per cent, so we would be very happy to land around 24,000-25,000 for 2026," company CFO Jatin Dalal said.
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The company noted a distinct shift in its recruitment profile, moving from a linear hiring model toward a graded system. This includes a premium hiring swim lane dubbed 'Tech Wizards' for recruits from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Other graded categories include power programmers and software engineers.
Kumar emphasised that the company now prioritises "learnability" over years of experience.
"People think more experienced hires is the way to go. I actually think learnability is the way to go. It is so fast and dynamically changing. In fact, if you go to the school graduates, you'll realise that they haven't seen the old way of doing software... so that unlearning is not needed, you could get much higher throughput," he added.
Addressing concerns about AI-led job losses, Kumar stated that while tech disruptions take away "jobs of the past", they create significantly more jobs for the future by modernising old software and reducing technical debt across enterprises.
The company on Wednesday reported about an 18.7 per cent increase in net income to USD 648 million in the December quarter. The company's Q4 2025 revenue came in line with estimates at USD 5,333 million, increasing 4.9 per cent year-on-year from USD 5,082 million in Q4 2024.
Cognizant's total employee count as of December 31, 2025, was 351,600, an increase of 1,800 from September 30, 2025 and 14,800 from December 31, 2024.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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