He had dedicated staff allocated to his biggest customers. His business ran like an assembly-line operation, as Shastri himself described. Company recruiters sent out their requirement list to him each Monday. By the end of the week, he had candidates matched, vetted and lined up for interviews.

These days PV Shastri Associates’ business is languishing. “Work is at a dismal low,” Shastri said, revealing that his hiring has fallen to a third or less of last year. His biggest customers who wanted 60 candidates’ resumes now barely need five, even that only to “backfill vacancies”, or fill critical positions.

Ironically, the man who specialises in hiring is finding himself part of the firing squad. Because of the industry downturn, Shastri has laid off 20 of his 30 employees, a process he says he found painful. His own employee count is now down to 10. He has shut down two offices in Pune and Bangalore, and is left with a single office just off Mahatma Gandhi Road in downtown Bangalore.

The slowing business has left Shastri plenty of time for his gruelling daily fitness regime consisting of a five-kilometer run and 75 push-ups. In the absence of conference calls from customers or other pressing work, Shastri has ample time to socialise every evening.

The placement consultancy business in Bangalore thrives mainly on the outsourcing industry. In recent years, when companies have been ramping up at astounding rates — some of the bigger ones such as Infosys Technologies have hired up to 10,000 employees in each quarter — placement consultancies too had their glory days.

Typically relying on a bank of resumes, referrals, head-hunting or even foraging on job websites, placement consultants channel employees to companies. For each employee recruited, companies usually pay a month’s salary as consultancy fee.

Shastri specialises in hiring for multinationals, and a candidate getting hired for a Rs-1-lakh salary meant that the consultancy earned as much. But the recent financial crisis is fast heading into a downward economic spiral in the United States. With the US accounting for about two-thirds of outsourcing to India, outsourcing firms’ business prospects are dented. In turn, this has hurt the job consultancies.

Nasscom, the outsourcing industry trade body, projects that the industry which has been growing at 30 per cent plus rates will slow to around 20 per cent, and a further downward revision of the growth seems a possibility. So, consultants like Shastri openly declare that they are in trouble. “These days we consultants meet up to cry on each other’s shoulder,” said Shastri.

Firing his own staff was wrenching, he said, but he did not see business improving, “at least in the near future”. He has not encountered such a gloomy scenario in the 17 years of his company’s existence, Shastri recalled.

Recruiters say without naming names that the largest companies have not only put a freeze on recruitment but are also shedding employees in small numbers. “No company will tell you openly but it is common knowledge that some companies plan to lay off the bottom 25 per cent based on the performance criterion,” says Shastri. Companies are getting inventive in laying off employees. Some are firing employees for ethics ¿ such as fudged resumes or work experience records or even cooked-up expense statements, all of which were overlooked during the boom times.

The other bane of the placement consultancy business currently is the dipping attrition rate, or the rate at which companies lose employees. In the high-growth phase that lasted until last year, companies which could keep attrition rates below 20 per cent had bragging rights. In some business process outsourcing (call centre) firms, attrition was so high that companies turned over their entire staff in three years or so. That scenario has completely reversed, much to the woe of Shastri and other recruiters.

Companies are freezing raises and perks. Even then, most workers in the software industry are too scared to contemplate a job move. They are unwilling to even circulate their resumes. “Employees are sticky and for once outsourcing companies are seeing stability in their workforce,” says Shastri.

For the moment, PVShastri Associates’ 10-person operation will continue to run. But all the talk of retrenchment, lay-offs and pink slips is unsettling. “If there is no recruitment, that means the industry is not growing and that is bad news,” says Shastri, who has seen the best of times in the nearly two decades of running his company.

The only silver lining in an otherwise dreary business landscape, Shastri believes, is the possibility of the global slowdown bringing in more opportunities for India’s outsourcing industry. If the recession continues, then outsourcing becomes even more attractive because of the cost savings, says Shastri as he reels off statistics about salaries being a fourth to a tenth in India at different levels. “Maybe there is an opportunity even in the slowdown,” Shastri muses, sounding just a bit tentative.