Tata Consultancy Services [Get Quote], the country's largest IT company, has changed its hiring strategy and will focus on just-in-time hiring or real-time talent management.

"TCS has decided to adopt the policy of real-time management whereby we will hire in the last three months of the final year of graduation rather than a year before," said S Ramadorai, managing director and chief executive officer, TCS.

This will not only help the company to optimise and increase its utilisation, but also align its hiring strategy closer to the demand and supply of business, a company spokesperson said.

The company is working on ways to reduce the two-month training period by half. TCS, with over 130,000 employees, has already freezed lateral hiring and plans to hire only on need basis.

"The decision is also been based on our constant interaction with the academia, which have been telling that students are not pursuing higher studies as they get jobs and also during the academic year they tend to get lax," added the company's spokesperson.

The decision will not impact the company's current hiring plan of recruiting over 24,000 students for FY10. The step comes immediately after the Nasscom announcement to hire students only in their eighth semester. "Some firms were hiring in the fourth or fifth semester of an academic year. However, now the IT trade body and companies have decided to hire only in the eighth semester of the academic year," said Nasscom President Som Mittal.

Mittal felt that this will help the students as well as the industry. "When you hire that early, students get confused and do not focus on their studies. Besides, we also realised that since many would get jobs they would not concentrate on further studies," added Mittal.