The Human Resources departments at IT and BPO companies have come up with some innovative steps to flight recessionary trends across the world with steps like reducing lateral hires, cutting down campus recruitments, reducing wage hikes while trying to delink revenue growth to that of manpower.

A report in the Economic Times quoted industry officials to state that the focus from here on will be on productivity increase and how best they can squeeze out more from the staff. While fresh recruits can look to increased work hours, the experienced hands could find it difficult to move jobs as companies cut down on lateral moves.

As for freshers with recruitment slips, they are being asked to wait longer before reporting for work or training. Nasscom chief Som Mittal claimed that employee utilization rates have spiked 4-5 per cent while wage hikes were down to 8-11 per cent.

India's largest IT company TCS may be hiring between 30 to 35K staff in the current fiscal year but most of it is at the entry level. Economic Times quoted TCS VP for HR Ajoy Mukerjee as saying that the company was expanding its employee pyramid base which means that over 60 per cent of recruitment will be at entry level.

The story is much the same at Satyam Computer where the article quoted Global HR Head SV Krishnan as stating that it had curbed lateral hires though there would be about 10-12K recruitments this year. There would be lateral hires only for high value work, he was quoted as saying.

Even the new hires may have to wait longer periods before they can hit the payrolls. In the words of Pratik Kumar, EVP of HR at Wipro, the company will be taking in people in small batches rather than mass scale recruitment.

The article further says that companies are now talking about de-linking revenue growth from manpower growth but the shift is yet to set in. So, going forward employees may find the going tough as there would be closer performance monitoring.

So, for the average to low performers, the next few quarters could prove tough, more so if new clients or contracts are tough to get.