With a freeze on hiring in most companies, business for head hunters is down to 20-30 per cent. And they fear that the worst is yet to come.

“Business is down by 80 per cent,” said Vipin Kumar, proprietor of G4 Consultancy who started the company two years ago in response to the huge demand for personnel in all industries.

Today, he hopes to be able to just about break even at the end of each month. “Till early this year, we placed at least 15-20 people every month. For the last two months, it has been down to one or two placements,” said Nitin Taksonde, the company’s HR in-charge.

Geeta Monga, head, MGA Systems, that does placements for IT and engineering services, said the trend started to show six months ago when placement agencies noticed a shift in demand from companies. “Hiring had become very cautious even then. Today the only sector where some movement is still there is insurance. But even there, the demand is only for very niche requirements,” she added.

According to another head hunter, some companies continue to post requirements but are not making recruitments. “They just want to be in the market. Also, we are inundated with calls from people who are being laid off or anticipate that eventuality soon. We are taking in their resumes. But we do not have any offers to place before them,” he said.

Vikrant Sasod of HR One that has been servicing top IT companies such as IBM, Zensar and TCS also admitted that a slowdown was definitely on.

“A year ago we would place a person almost every other day. Now it’s vastly different,” said Sasode who charges companies anything from 10 to 16 per cent of the gross annual salary of the person placed.

“Nowadays we are happy if we can recover the cost of running our office,” he said. Tracing the changing tide to the news of Lehman Bros bankruptcy, he added, “Things changed very rapidly after that”.

Pamela Ponappa of the Bangalore-based CRV Consultancies that used to do 40 placements a month in the heydays and charged the companies 12.5 per cent of the placed employee’s gross annual salary, has showed a brave face. According to her, things should look up by January.

“November-December is a lean season for projects from the US, because of Christmas. The first quarter should bring some hope,” she said, adding that they too had put a freeze on recruitment in their company as a cost-cuttingmeasure.

But most other head hunters differ. The consensus is that things will continue to go downhill till almost a year before they stabilise. Till then, it will probably be survival of the fittest.