Eighty five percent of Dallas/Fort Worth-area chief financial officers plan to hire full-time professional employees to expand or fill vacant positions in the next six months, according a study by staffing firm Robert Half. Of the CFOs surveyed, 19 percent say their companies are creating new positions.
According to Cecil Gregg, Robert Half’s district president for the Dallas/Fort Worth area, the local economy is outperforming surrounding markets. And the numbers don’t lie. Stanley W. Suchman, regional commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Dallas-Kansas City Region, said Dallas ranked second in both the number of jobs added and the rate of job growth among the 12 largest metropolitan areas in the country.
Within the last year, professional and business services industry registered the largest annual gain with an 9.5 percent increase in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington sector—almost three times the national average.
Due to the thriving economy and job market, employers are now more willing to negotiate salaries with top-contending applicants than they were a year ago. “Highly skilled professionals are increasingly hard to find, which has created the need for companies to move fast and offer competitive compensation packages,” Gregg says.
A competitive job market doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy for companies to fill positions, newly created or vacant. In fact, 63 percent of the CFOs surveyed said that qualified, highly-skilled candidates for professional positions are a bit of a challenge to find. Recruiters are tasked with tapping into a new network of talent and discovering top-notch candidates who are transitioning into the market.
“Dallas is a magnet for talent and becoming more and more attractive to job seekers looking to move to the area because they know it is a vibrant business community,” Gregg says. As a result, competition between highly qualified applicants and skilled candidates gunning for these open positions continues to intensify.
Still, 92 percent of Dallas/Fort Worth executives surveyed are optimistic about the business outlook and growth potential for the next six months. Gregg states that due to a tightening market, Robert Half’s candidates become more and more receptive to hiring recent college graduates since companies can make the investment to train employees and help them develop skill sets that easily translate into other roles within an organization.
Robert Half’s latest hiring local results are based on interviews with 100 CFOs from a random sample of companies in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with 20 or more employees.
