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The survey reports a net employment outlook of 13% for the Houston area from January through March of next year. That’s on par with Manpower’s hiring estimates for October through December of this year.

Ron Griffin, regional vice president with Manpower, says Houston area companies are hiring at a faster pace than those in other metro areas. But he says the rest of the country is starting to catch up.

“If you look at the Houston area and Texas overall, we never took the hit that a lot of the rest of the country did in employment. Some of the rest of the country were up in the high teens in an unemployment rate, where Texas pretty much capped out at around 10%. So I think the rest of the country is coming back a little bit stronger right now because they were down a lot farther than where Texas was.”

Nineteen percent of local companies interviewed plan to hire more workers in the first quarter of 2013, while 6% plan to cut staff. Virtually all those remaining expect to maintain their current workforce levels.