More Americans Willing to Move for New Jobs

By Rieva Lesonsky

Are you looking for new employees? Well, don’t feel your search is limited to those in your own backyard. I’m not talking about virtual employees or outsourcing, either: A new study by CareerBuilder of workers nationwide found nearly half (44 percent) of respondents would willing to relocate for a career opportunity. In fact, CareerBuilder says that off laid-off employees who found jobs in the past year, 20 percent relocated to do so.

At the same time, more employers are struggling to find skilled workers–and are willing to pay to import talent to their city. Thirty-two percent of employers in the survey said would be willing to pay to relocate new employees this year; 19 percent would pay a smaller first-year salary so they could give a relocating employee a signing bonus.

Which types of workers are most in demand? The top areas for which workers were most willing to pay to relocate employees all relate to technology or to revenue-generating jobs:

• Engineering – 30 percent of employers
• Information Technology – 23 percent
• Business Development – 21 percent
• Sales – 21 percent
• Financial – 16 percent
• Marketing – 13 percent
• Legal – 11 percent

If you’re looking for workers out of your area, you might want to check out CareerBuilder’s new site, CareerRelocate.com, which targets workers who are seeking employment outside of their area. Employers can post jobs and find candidates. Job candidates can search by keyword or category search to see where the most and fewest opportunities are for their skills; view jobs in different cities; compare salary averages and standard of living in different cities; and research homes, property values, mortgage quotes and moving and storage costs.

More than three-fourths of workers who relocated in the last year said they didn’t regret the decision. But if you’re planning to hire workers from outside your area, you should be aware of the top problems workers cited with relocating:

• Cost of living is higher – 26 percent
• More stress on the family unit – 24 percent
• Difficult to make new friends – 18 percent
• Feeling homesick – 16 percent

Knowing what issues your new employee is dealing with can help you be proactive in supporting them so they feel valued and welcome at your company.

Image by Flickr user Marxchivist (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business, small business, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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