Manpower addition amongst the four top IT enabled services companies is witnessing a sharp decline during the first quarter of the current financial year, published media reports have suggested.

The days of indiscriminate hiring in the IT services industry is now over, says a senior director for HR at an ITeS company while referring to the standing joke in IT industry some years ago when people said that "Tresspassers will be recruited".

While TCS and Infosys saw a decline in net manpower addition by a few hundred as against data available for the first quarter of 2007, the article published in The Hindu says that the figures for the latest quarter were lower than the numbers of the first quarter of the calendar year 2008.

The article says that the latest slump could also be a result of the fact that fresh recruitments actually materialise only after the June quarter. The case was pretty much the same with Satyam Computers and Wipro though in the latter the numbers for first quarter were significantly higher than the rest.

What is interesting is that the attrition rates remained high, which indicates that those leaving a job were getting a replacement quite easily. The article put the rates at between 12.8 and 13.6 per cent for TCS and Infosys respectively while in the case of Satyam, there was an actual decline.

The article also said that both TCS and Wipro had already clarified that salary hikes would be lower this year in view of the gloomy business environment prevailing globally. While Wipro kept the salary hike at between 8-9 per cent, the others did not put a figure to like increase.