With deceleration in revenue and hazy demand outlook, top IT companies will try hard to guard profitability.Improving the proportion of fixed cost projects in revenue, making hiring decisions more dynamic and keeping check on operating costs are some of the initiatives taken by IT exporters to retain operating margins within a permissible band.The current news reports about layoffs by some of the companies then appear to be one more step in that direction. Also, replacing experienced employees with those having less than two-three years of experience may not be ruled out as a strategy to reduce salary expenses.Headcount management is among the common tools to retain profitability when revenue growth is lukewarm. According to the ETIG analysis of the past data of Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro, the aggregate dollar-denominated revenue increased at a seven-year low rate of 7% in FY17. In addition, it decelerated in each of the past three fiscals reflecting the rising pressure on the topl ine due to shifting preference of clients from traditional IT to digital platform.Headcount of these companies, too, has followed the downward trend.The number of employees added after considering attrition (net addition), too, has decelerated in the past two years. In FY17, the sample added 72,470 employees, the lowest addition in three years.The headcount rationalisation is also aimed at improving the revenue per employee. It is a parameter that is monitored closely of late with in creasing focus on non-linearity of revenue, which means the extent of incremental revenue no more depends upon the extent of employee addition. The sample's revenue has risen to $48,056 per employee in FY17 from $44,296 in FY13. This was largely driven by the improvement shown by Cognizant, TCS, and Infosys.With rising pressure from the US to hire locally, Indian IT exporters find themselves at an inflection point.Companies are finding ways to adhere to changing business needs. As Arvind Thakur, CEO of a midcap IT player pointed out, offshoring may be in vogue again to keep delivery costs low. “We need to convince clients to increase the proportion to offshoring,“ he said in a phone call with ET after the quarterly results on May 5.This means while IT companies lay off more experienced staff, they may recruit more of freshers and those under three years of experience either in India or locally in the overseas markets.