New Delhi, March 13: Infosys Technologies will employ all those candidates to whom it has sent call letters.

“All the call letters that have been sent out will be honoured. We are sticking to our numbers. We will honour the commitments we have made,” Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, said on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry.

India’s No. 2 IT firm has been going slow on hiring because of the global recession.

Though Nilekani did not divulge any details, the Nasdaq-listed company is reportedly hiring only if it is absolutely necessary. Infosys has more than a lakh employees on its rolls.

However, it has decided to absorb all the 18,000 freshers to whom it had offered jobs in the next fiscal.

For the current fiscal, Infosys had said that it would hire around 27,000.

CEO S. Gopalakrishnan had earlier said that the job situation could get worse if the recession lasted for a very long period.

He expected the situation to improve by mid-2010, but his worst-case scenario was of the recession lasting till 2014.

On the US government’s decision to put curbs on H1-B visas, Nilekani said protectionist measures would not help anybody. “We are all for free trade, it’s good for the world, it’s a way of spurring growth. While there is this murmur (H1-B visa issue), I hope people realise that we need free trade,” he said.

Under Barack Obama, the US has threatened to withdraw tax benefits to American companies who resort to outsourcing.