Cognizant bullish on fresher hiring and signals non-linearity in revenue
Cognizant is bullish on fresher hiring and the bulk of the IT major’s headcount additions in the quarter ended September 2025 are freshers, CEO Ravi Kumar S, said on Wednesday.
In a media briefing post the company’s September quarter earnings, Kumar mentioned that through freshers working with AI tools, the company has reduced its cost of human capital. “In the world of AI, we will need more school graduates than before. With the right AI tooling, infrastructure and culture, you can create more throughput even with freshers,” he said.
“Last year, we did 9,000 freshers, and this year, we are probably going to do 20,000,” he added. He pointed out that Cognizant is also reducing cost of human capital by hiring at the bottom of the pyramid. CFO Jatin Dalal said that they remain “equally ambitious” on fresher hiring for next year.
“Thirty per cent of Cognizant’s code is written by machines,” Kumar said, adding that this number will keep going up.
Non-linearity trend
Kumar called out a clear trend of ‘non-linearity’ that was emerging for the IT major between employee count and revenue. “Our revenue has grown 4 per cent organically over the last year, while employee additions have been less than 3 per cent. There will be addition of people in future, but it will be non-linear to revenue,” he said.
This non-linearity is also indicated in the growth of the company’s revenue per person. Cognizant’s revenue per person has gone up 8 per cent in trailing twelve months (TTM) and margin per person has gone up 10 per cent TTM, Kumar said.
Interestingly, Cognizant is also seeing the share of its fixed price contracts rising. “Our fixed price business has gone up from 43 per cent to 47 per cent, and our time and material contracts’ share has gone the other way (47 to 43),” he said. So we are essentially getting higher productivity and throughput through use of AI and then leveraging those savings for agentic journeys, he said. The unit costs are going down for AI; more use-cases are coming up, he said.
With regard to the company’s performance in this quarter, Kumar said Cognizant is on track to become an “AI builder” enterprise in the “two swim lanes” of software development and agentic development. “The four industries segments have organically grown and we have an all-round performance,” he said.
Published on October 29, 2025