US recruiter’s leaked email exposes hiring criteria: non-Americans are big NO; ex-Infosys, TCS, Wipro blacklisted

A Reddit user stated that a US-based recruiter accidentally sent him/her a ‘secret internal selection guidelines’, which seeks to blacklist candidates who have ever worked in leading Indian IT giants, including Infosys, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The leaked internal memo has ignited controversy over the ‘selective hiring criteria’ for software engineers.

The memos surfaced on Reddit two days ago. They outlined some stringent preferences, favouring graduates from elite universities while explicitly rejecting candidates from certain backgrounds. The hiring criteria also prefer only American candidates and diversity hires, with no VISA sponsorships.

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The leaked memo

The memo states that ideal candidates should have a “Bachelors or Masters of Computer Science from a top CS program” and lists institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, Caltech, UIUC, and the University of Waterloo. It notes that "special exceptions" could be made for graduates from other schools, but only if they had a 4.0 GPA. The leaked memo stated there would be “absolutely no visa sponsorships,” restricting applications to US citizens, permanent residents, and Canadians.

Additionally, the document emphasises hiring candidates with “4-10 years of software development experience,” expertise in modern JavaScript (TypeScript, NodeJS, ReactJS), and AI/LLMs, while discouraging applicants from big companies unless they had startup experience. It also explicitly rejects “job hoppers” and candidates from consulting backgrounds.

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Blacklisted companies

The memo included a blacklist of employees from major companies, stating: “Candidates who have ever worked at the following companies are not the right fit.” The list included Intel, Cisco, HP, TCS, Tata, Mahindra, Infosys, Capgemini, Dell, Cognizant, and Wipro.

The user who shared the memo expressed frustration despite meeting much of the listed criteria. The Redditor said, “The sheer pretentiousness and elitism kinda pissed me off ngl. And I'm someone who meets a lot of this criteria, which is why the recruiter contacted me, but it still pisses me off.”

"What we are looking for" is referring to the end client internal memo to the recruiter, not the job candidate. The public job posting obviously doesn't look like this. Just wanted to post this to show yall how some recruiters are looking at things nowadays," the Reddit user added, while posting the memo.

The post quickly went viral, sparking widespread debate on social media. Many criticised the hiring guidelines as elitist and exclusionary. One user commented on the Reddit post, saying, “This is true. I work for a big company, and I’ve been trying to move internally to tech for years. They flat out told me they only hire students from certain universities for those jobs.” Another user commended on the post, saying, "For those who are curious, the company is called "Her" and is a dating app company."