Wanderlust in the workforce
Dallas-Fort Worth punches in as one of top targets for U.S. job seekers
If there are a lot of newbies who hail from Houston or New York City roaming around your workplace, we’ve got a likely explanation: Dallas-Fort Worth punches in as one of the top geographic targets for job hunters in the U.S., a new study shows.
Career website Glassdoor put DFW at No. 9 on its new list of the top metro areas where applicants from other metro areas are interested in moving for jobs. Appearing at No. 10, Austin was the only other Texas metro that made Glassdoor’s top 10.
Among job seekers hoping to hop from one metro to another, DFW snagged 2.8 percent of all job applications, with Austin at 2.3 percent. In the top position was San Francisco, followed by New York City; San Jose, California; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Chicago; and Seattle.
“Geography and economic factors are two factors at play when it comes to where people are drawn to move. … We found job seekers are drawn to cities like Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin, two rapidly growing Texas cities with a lot of job opportunities that attract ambitious talent,” Glassdoor career expert Alison Sullivan says.
The Glassdoor study is based on a sample of more than 668,000 online job applications started on Glassdoor during a one-week period in January 2018 for the 40 largest metro areas in the U.S.
The study seems to indicate that both DFW and Austin are doing a fair amount of resident swapping with other major metro areas.
Dallas-Fort Worth attracts the most job applicants from Houston, followed by New York City, Austin, Chicago, and Los Angeles, according to Glassdoor. For Austin, the No. 1 supplier of job applicants was DFW, followed by Houston, San Antonio, New York City, and Los Angeles.
“What we found is that these cities are often magnets drawing in job seekers from nearby cities,” Sullivan says. “For instance, job seekers interested in moving to Austin included those from nearby San Antonio, as well as Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Dallas-Fort Worth saw a similar pattern among those wanting to move there.”
Glassdoor was even able to pinpoint the DFW and Austin employers drawing the most applicants.
In DFW, the top five, in descending order, were American Airlines, Lockheed Martin, Allstate, IBM, and Texas Instruments. For Austin, the most popular employers for job seekers were IBM, Dell, the University of Texas, PayPal, and Silicon Laboratories.
“Picking up your life and moving for a job is a major decision. But in a job market where workers are in high demand and many employers are eager to hire, the employers who understand where talent is heading and what influences them to consider a move will have a recruiting advantage,” Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist, says in a release.
“Our research shows that employers should think broader when it comes to their recruiting strategies,” he adds, “as the quality talent they want may not only be found in their local market, but across the country.”