Cognizant plans to hire about 25,000 freshers from Indian colleges in 2026

Cognizant announced on Wednesday that it plans to hire approximately 24,000-25,000 fresh graduates in 2026 as part of its strategy to expand its "bottom of the pyramid" workforce.

About Cognizant's new hiring

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 stated the company is keen on a "broader pyramid" strategy, shifting high-value tech expertise to entry-level employees through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Mentioning the non-linearity of revenue and margins, he said the company is decoupling revenue growth from headcount growth.

For 2025, the company’s revenues grew by 6.4 per cent (in constant currency), while the workforce increased by only 4 per cent, resulting in a 2.6 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.

Cognizant further said that of the 20,000 graduates it hired in 2025, 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.

The company changed 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 disclosed 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.

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