Larsen & Toubro (L&T) to Hire 1,500 People This Year

New Delhi: Infrastructure giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T) plans to hire 1,500 people this year, the same as in 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, we hire close to 1,500 people across functions every year and we see no discontinuity in this practice unless business dynamics change drastically," Yogi Sriram, Senior Vice President - Corporate HR, Larsen & Toubro, said.

Sriram added that L&T's employee attrition rate of around 5 per cent 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, Sriram said: "We are putting a greater emphasis on ensuring wider participation of women and frame policies to enable 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 defence engineering projects, he said.

Asked whether there will be job cuts as the company opts for digitisation, Sriram said, "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 digitalised platform, called ATLNext, caters to the learning needs of its workforce.

Business magazine Forbes had listed L&T among the 'World's Best Employers' for 2018. The list, based on Forbes' Global 2000 rankings of publicly traded companies in 60 countries, placed L&T at number 22, 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 per cent shares from the open market. Besides, an open offer has been made to buy over 5.13 crore shares, amounting to about 31 per cent stake.