Salary Windfall in Cards for Managerial Candidates

Managers in Demand: It’s a good time to be an up-and-coming manager. Human resource officers from some of the largest companies expect to offer salaries that are 5 percent to 15 percent higher to recruit top management professionals in several fields, including accounting and finance, clinical, engineering and information technology. That forecast is in spite of shrinking corporate payrolls and rising unemployment rates in the U.S., according to a recent survey by Hyrian, a recruitment process outsourcer in Los Angeles. About 75 percent of companies expect to recruit more aggressively in 2008 than they did during the previous five years—with two-thirds of executives fully anticipating the need to actively recruit “all or most of the time” this year. These findings, should they come to fruition, have implications for long-term career development of new hires: Nearly 80 percent of executives surveyed cite retention as their most pressing concern in 2008.