...................................... Largest employers
Houston’s biggest nongovernment employers have been hesitant over the past year, as even the largest hospitals have slowed the runaway growth they enjoyed that had buoyed the local market while energy sagged.
That’s added up to tepid overall job growth in the area, with Houston’s employment base adding only 0.6 percent in 2016 — far behind the statewide average of 1.7 percent. Hiring picked up strongly to 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve, but largely in the industrial sectors that had suffered most through the oil downturn.
“White-collar jobs are still very scarce,” says Bill Gilmer, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston’s Bauer School of Business. “When they are filled, it’s usually at a discount compared to the salary that was being paid previously.”
That’s reflected in changes in head count at Houston’s biggest companies, many of which are the corporate offices of oil producers that are growing operations in the field, but not at headquarters. For example, the oil field services company National Oilwell Varco shed nearly a third of its jobs, ConocoPhillips and Nabors shrank by a fifth, Chevron fell 13 percent and Schlumberger cut 6 percent.
For those companies, the focus has shifted to keeping quality talent on board to avoid the cost of replacing their accumulated knowledge and skills, says Danaan Smith, Houston market manager for the recruiting company Robert Half.
“One of the most important things for them is retaining the talent that they have,” Smith says. “You lose intellectual property when they walk out.”
While many of those energy declines were just as steep as the year before, health care employers haven’t been backfilling those job losses as strongly as they did previously, with the employment growth rate in hospitals declining from its high in late 2015.
The city’s No. 2 and No. 4 employers, Memorial Hermann and Houston Methodist, expanded by single-digit percentages, down from 20 percent and 18 percent growth in 2015. Harris Health System, MD Anderson Cancer Research Center and Colorado-based St. Luke’s all shed employees, with large layoffs at the last two hitting in early 2017 as the companies posted steep revenue losses.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that health care has stopped hiring. Laura Bowen, president of the Houston staffing company Team1Medical, says layoffs have mostly been on the support and back-office side — demand is still high for occupational and physical therapists, certified medical assistants who are now required by regulations to deal with electronic medical records, and X-ray technicians, who bring in revenue.
“Diagnostic imaging, for hospitals, is really an opportunity to make money,” Bowen notes.
Some of the fastestgrowing companies in the region have been manufacturers, such as Goodman Technology, which added nearly 800 jobs for its new HVAC factory in Waller County. Firms that service the string of new petrochemical facilities along the Ship Channel also did well, including Universal Plant Services, which expanded 19 percent.
Even as Amazon prepares to add jobs at its new Harris County fulfillment center, the No. 1 employer in the Houston area is still the brick-and-mortar retailer Walmart, which has 33,500 workers across the metro area. That’s essentially flat from last year, after opening a couple of neighborhood markets and a supercenter in 2016. Other big-box retailers like Academy Sports + Outdoors and Stage Stores are contracting, and after a few years of catching up with the population, Walmart is easing off the gas.
“We’re not growing at the same rate as we were,” Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield says. “So what we’re opening in 2018 and beyond, I don’t have that info.”