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.