NEW DELHI: India's largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said on Monday it will hire up to 5,000 employees in northern region this fiscal and 70 per cent hirings will come from smaller cities.
    
"The company is set to hire 3,000 at trainee level and 2,000 positions will be filled through lateral hirings in the northern region. We plan to hire over 70 per cent candidates from tier II and tier III cities due to quality talent present in these places which we don't want to miss out on," TCS Vice-President Human Resources Thomas Simon said .
    
The company believes that the knowledge base of these candidates is as strong as their counterparts belonging to bigger cities. However, imparting training in areas of language, soft skills and etiquette is essential to give them a finishing touch, he said. The compensation and rewards for employees across centres would be similar, Simon added.
    
Eligibility criterion for trainees would remain to be a minimum 60 per cent score in all the degrees attained. As for hiring experienced professionals, the cut-off has been kept at 50 per cent, Simon said.
    
Hirings would be taken up for positions based in the NCR region apart from Lucknow. While experienced professional hirings would be done for pre-mapped positions, the trainees would be sent to Thiruvananthapuram for initial training.
    
The company had earlier said it planned to ramp up head- count by 32,000 across India this fiscal.