HCLTech will pay some freshers four times what it pays others. The top of its campus pay scale starts at Rs 18 lakh a year. The bottom starts at Rs 4.5 lakh.
The company has completed its FY27 fresher hiring after visiting engineering campuses across the country from July onwards. Ram Sundararajan, chief people officer, HCLTech, has said the intake is likely to be similar to FY26, at roughly 11,000. The headcount may be steady. The value attached to different skills is not.
The Rs 18 lakh floor applies to what HCLTech calls its Elite Engineer cadre, which it has scaled up this year. Drawn from IITs and NITs across the country, these graduates are hired for frontier technology areas including semiconductors and silicon, AI, data engineering, physical AI and robotics, and quantum.
“The company is pivoting to a skills-based hiring approach with focus on emerging technologies that are in demand with clients globally,” Sundararajan said. He added that the Elite Engineer programme “continues to play an important role in our strategy to build future-ready talent”.
The rest of the intake comes largely through Primus, a programme under which more than 60 partner engineering colleges receive hiring priority. HCLTech works with these colleges on industry readiness, including guidance on curriculum, and conducts expert mentorship sessions, tech talks and hackathons on their campuses.
Candidates from Primus colleges are assessed on cognitive ability, coding and technical skills, and English proficiency, followed by interviews. Based on this evaluation, they are placed in one of three tiers: Ascend, Momentum or Polaris. Salaries start at Rs 4.5 lakh for Ascend and go up to Rs 10 lakh for Polaris.
Even the highest-paid Primus tier, then, remains below where the Elite Engineer cadre begins. For a company expecting to hire roughly the same number of freshers as last year, that widening salary range says something about how campus talent is being valued: the engineering degree gets a graduate through the door, but increasingly it is the scarcity and relevance of the skills attached to it that determine what the company is prepared to pay.
