The best areas to start your career.
By Jacquelyn Smith
Good news for job seekers: Employers are now the most optimistic they've been about hiring since 2007.
Employment services firm ManpowerGroup asked more than 11,000 employers in the 100 largest US metropolitan areas about their hiring plans for the three-month period ending in December and found that employers in all 50 states plan to increase their payrolls during the fourth quarter of 2015.
Of the surveyed employers, 21% expect to increase their payrolls and 6% say they'll decrease their staffing levels. This yields a net increase of 15% that plan to hire — or 18% when seasonally adjusted, which is up 2% from last quarter, and up 3% from last year at this time.
Those are the strongest predictions in eight years.
"The US labor market continues to show broad-based, stable growth, with significant milestones over time such as hiring prospects at a seven-year high, unemployment at 5.1% and weekly jobless claims recently reaching a 40-year low," said Jonas Prising, CEO of ManpowerGroup, in a press release. "But as the labor market tightens, employers are increasingly telling us they are having difficulty finding skilled candidates — a situation not helped by the low labor participation rate."
Here are the 20 best cities for job seekers this spring, ranked by the net percentage of employers in each city that plan to hire: