BENGALURU: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), once a jobs-creating machine, is now fast slowing down on that count. The company added just 3,657 employees in the first nine months of this fiscal on a net basis, an 85% drop from the same period a year earlier, when it added 24,654 employees.It’s a reflection of stuttering growth, and what industry experts have been saying for some time, that the days of bulk hirings from campuses are a thing of the past as companies look at automating basic repetitive work and hiring primarily niche skill sets, especially in new-age digital technologies.“A year prior, we were building capacity in advance. We made 40,000 campus offers. We made a gross addition of over 78,912 and we made a net addition of 33,000-34,000. We are now looking at just in time hiring,” said Ajoy Mukherjee , executive vice president and globalhead of human resources at TCS.TCS is not an exception.TOI reported in November that for the first six months of the fiscal, the top six Indian IT companies saw its workforce decline by 13,402 compared to an addition of 60,240 in the same period a year earlier. Slowing growth is a major contributor to this. TCS on Thursday reported its slowest incremental revenue increase in four quarters, as its bread and butter banking, financial service & insurance (BFSI) business registered a negative growth, hurt by the persistent weakness plaguing the sector for more than a year now. The segment, which heavily depends on the IT spending capacity of the big banks and financial services companies in the US, has been an area of concern for India’s largest software services firm for some time.For the third quarter ended December 31, BFSI revenue fell on a sequential basis by 1.5%, a rare phenomenon in TCS’ history. The segment contributes about 33% to the topline.“On banking, we are on a wait and watch mode and still a couple of periods away from meaningful recovery,” chief executive Rajesh Gopinathan said at a news conference on Thursday. On an overall basis, TCS’ revenue stood at $4.79 billion in the third quarter, up 6.2% on a constant currency basis compared to the corresponding quarter in 2016-17.The company, which counts Nielsen, Rolls Royce and Marks & Spencer among its clients, said digital now accounts for 22% of its revenue. “Digital is complex—domain, tech, contextual knowledge, and TCS has all these capabilities to stitch together large engagements. We have a run rate of $4 billion in digital,” Gopinathan said. Out of the 11 deals the company won in the third quarter, four of them had Ignio, its cognitive automation platform, embedded.