Hiring in times of boom and bust

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/low-morale-prompts-top-4-it-firms-to-skip-employer-survey/370122/

This is good. In my corporate life, I have found absolutely no value add from the so called HR specialists. Often, they take your info and give it back to you in a different form. Generally, they end up hiking the cost of hiring and inflating the wage bill.I remember a firm called Hewitt or something like that which used to send me questionnaires and then ask for a fee for the full report! Wonder what the firm ever did to charge a fee! All they did was send a stupid excel sheet to a few firms and agglomerated the data. They had the cheek to ask for almost a lakh of rupees for this so called 'survey' of which the only use was that some key employee would study it and ask for what the highest paid in the bracket was getting. This survey single handedly pushed up the wage costs in the financial services industry. Typically, the CEO would like to hire juniors at as high a salary as possible, to justify his own fancy salary.
I found that the best way to keep the new hire pay down is to ask for the latest salary slip. Most candidates generally lie about their salaries. Even after giving their salary slips, they will maintain that there are some things 'off the record'. These are generally lies. Today, not even marwari companies give you too much 'off the record'. More disgusting is the lies the candidates make about 'expected' bonus. It is generally useful if you tell them to go collect it and then join. This usually is a ploy to extract 'sign on' bonuses, which became popular.