IT services provider Cognizant stated on Thursday that it had made over 28,000 campus offers from across the country to meet growing demand.

The company also raised its revenue growth forecast to 7-9% for fiscal year 2021, or 5.6-7.6% in constant currency terms. It has guided for 10.5-11.5% growth in the second quarter. Teaneck, New Jersey-based Cognizant follows a January-December financial year.

“We have upped (campus hires) to 28,000 plus. That's what we offered in 2021,” stated Rajesh Nambiar, chairman and managing director of Cognizant India. “We remain very confident in Cognizant standing as a magnet for skilled talent and a great place to build a career.”

Nambiar stated there had been a meaningful increase in the company’s brand perception in recent quarters, especially in the talent market.

“Our campus acceptance rate amongst all India's top engineering colleges has risen more. And now it's roughly about 81%. It's up 10 percentage points since 2019," he said, warning however that the bigger issue facing the company is not attracting talent but losing them.

we do not have an issue in terms of attracting talent, but we're also losing talent, which is the biggest issue," he added.

The reason for Cognizant's high attrition rate is because the market for digital talent is getting competitive, Nambiar stated, adding that since it is building that talent, the IT leader has become a 'target' for rivals. However, the marketplace will settle down as the current attrition rates are a temporary phenomenon, he added.

“Our Q1 attrition rate was actually within the historic range," he stated. “It wasn't too off the charts. Our daily resignation trend has actually increased in the past quarter.

Cognizant is stepping up internal efforts and further investing in employees through trainings, job rotation, and through targeted salary increases and promotions, Nambiar stated.

“We're also shifting to a quarterly promotion cycle to all the billable associates and ramping up our hiring capacity by adding hundreds of recruiters,” he added.

There is, however, a demand-supply imbalance for talent across hyperscale, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and also digital engineering - like full stack engineers, or in the data space with artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said.

The current work-from-home environment does not build a sense of community, and is also fuelling the high attrition rates, he added.

“We entered 2021 with a very strong backlog, our pipelines continue to be strong. What it also means is that when the pipeline is strong, our backlog is going to be strong. Booking actually grew by 5% year over year and that's a very nice indication,” Nambiar stated.

“And what is also interesting is that within the 5% in booking, if you look at the digital portfolio, and broadly our priority areas are what we call digital background, that is actually outperforming the total company booking,” he stated.

The company deployed about $700 million on acquisitions, share repurchases and dividends in the first quarter. Cognizant announced four acquisitions - Linium, Servian, Magenic and ESG Mobility, during the period.