The uncertainty in the global financial markets has taken its toll on the recruitment plans of IT majors. The top four IT exporters have reportedly nearly frozen hiring of experienced professionals and have deferred the joining dates for many freshers.

India’s top IT exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has sent out letters postponing joining dates by six to nine months for new recruits according to a report published in the Economic Times. “This quarter, we don’t immediately see a drop in revenues. But we expect the next quarter to show flat to negative growth for some of the top firms,” said an IT analyst, adding that TCS had the highest exposure to financial services among the top tier firms with around 43-44 % of its revenues coming from financial services.

Brokerage firm CLSA conducted a survey across 45 colleges, and received dismal results. The report stated that graduating class of 2009 has received 17.4% lesser job offers compared to the previous year’s figures. Offers from Satyam and Wipro were about 33-50 % lower while that of TCS and Infosys Technologies were 16% and 12% lower, respectively.

The numbers could not be confirmed with the IT firms because they were in the silent period before their second quarter results. However, a Satyam spokesperson said, “We haven’t changed our 12,000-15 ,000 guidance for new hires and we will honor our commitments.”

There were reports that TCS had scaled down the number of hires it had projected for the year from 35,000 to 30,000 while multinational IBM had asked about 1,000 employees to leave. Infosys is the only firm that has so far stuck to the number of 25,000 hires that it had initially given out.

The CLSA survey, which is probably the first comprehensive survey after the slowdown, said Accenture was the only large firm to have shown an increase in hiring numbers among the colleges it visited. The colleges were spread across eight cities and the top IT exporters had collectively hired 7,278 freshers from them last year.