About a quarter of small companies expect to ramp up hiring in the coming months, a recent CareerBuilder survey shows.
The jobs site reported July 21 that 24 percent of small businesses - those with 50 or fewer workers - plan to take on new workers between July and December. Larger companies appeared more interested in hiring: Thirty-two percent of companies with fewer than 500 employees planned to expand their payrolls in the second half of the year.
Small businesses - often seen as an engine of economic growth - may also be helping people supplement their income. Among the survey respondents who had started their own business in the past year, 96 percent said they were running it while they held another job.
CareerBuilder's findings come as the business climate for small firms looks to be stagnating. The National Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying group based in Washington, reports that small business owners' optimism declined in June. "The performance of the economy is mediocre at best, given the extent of the decline over the past two years," the NFIB's June sentiment survey said.
CareerBuilder's poll involved nearly 1,400 hiring managers and 4,500 workers. At a confidence level of 95 percent, the hiring manager survey had a margin of error of 2.65 percentage points, while the worker survey had an error margin of 1.46 points.
