Texas Employers Are Hiring Again, But Skills Gaps Are Getting Harder to Ignore
Texas employers have reason to feel more confident about hiring as they plan for the final months of 2026. But an improving labor market does not necessarily make specialized positions easier to fill.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ latest Texas Employment Forecast points to continued job growth across the state. At the same time, Texas employers continue to report difficulty finding people with the capabilities they need.
For hiring managers, there is an important distinction in those trends: candidate availability and qualified-talent availability are not the same thing.
A position can attract dozens of applicants and still be difficult to fill. When that happens, simply generating more applications may not solve the problem. Employers first need to determine what is actually constraining the search.
Start by Identifying the Hiring Constraint
When a vacancy stays open longer than expected, it is easy to conclude that there is a talent shortage. Sometimes that is exactly what is happening. Specialized skills, credentials, or experience may genuinely be scarce.
But a difficult search can have other causes.
Compensation may be below the market for the required experience. A job description may combine too many responsibilities. Geographic or on-site requirements may shrink the available pool. The interview process may screen out strong candidates unnecessarily. Or the organization may simply be reaching the same group of active applicants rather than professionals who are not actively searching.
The first step should therefore be diagnosis.
Ask:
- Are we receiving too few applicants, or too few qualified applicants?
- Which requirement eliminates the most otherwise promising candidates?
- Are compensation and flexibility aligned with the level of experience we expect?
- Are we reaching professionals beyond those applying through traditional job postings?
- Is the position itself realistic for the talent available in our market?
Those questions lead to more useful decisions than automatically lowering standards, increasing job-board spending, or restarting the same search.
Separate Essential Skills From an Ideal Candidate Profile
One of the most effective ways to address a constrained talent pool is to revisit the job requirements before revisiting the candidates.
Start by dividing qualifications into three groups:
Required on day one. These are capabilities the employee genuinely needs to perform the job safely, legally, or effectively from the start. Examples might include a required professional license, highly specialized technical knowledge, or experience managing a particular type of operation.
Transferable or learnable. These are capabilities where strong adjacent experience could be sufficient. A finance professional who has mastered one major ERP platform, for example, may be able to learn another without having used that exact system previously.
Preferred rather than essential. These are qualifications that would be helpful but should not automatically eliminate an otherwise strong candidate.
This exercise is particularly valuable for specialized positions in Accounting & Finance, Engineering, IT, HR, Legal, Supply Chain, Marketing, and other professional functions where employers may be looking for a very specific combination of industry, systems, and functional experience.
The goal is not to reduce expectations. It is to make sure every requirement has a clear connection to successful performance.
Evaluate Evidence of Capability, Not Just Résumé Similarity
When qualified talent is limited, employers can also broaden their options by examining what candidates have actually accomplished.
Two candidates may have different titles or industry backgrounds while possessing many of the same underlying capabilities.
Structured interviews can help uncover those similarities. Instead of asking only whether someone has performed an identical job, ask candidates to explain how they have:
- solved a comparable business problem,
- learned an unfamiliar system or process,
- managed competing priorities,
- handled an unexpected operational issue,
- worked across departments, or
- applied technical knowledge to a new situation.
For appropriate roles, work samples, technical assessments, and realistic scenarios can add another layer of evidence.
This is also where specialized recruiting expertise can be particularly valuable. Recruiters who understand a function and its talent market can often recognize transferable experience that a keyword search or rigid screening checklist may overlook.
Human judgment matters because the best candidate is not always the person whose résumé most closely resembles the job description.
Know When the Problem Is Compensation, Not Skills
Employers should also distinguish a genuine skills shortage from a compensation mismatch.
If qualified candidates consistently withdraw, decline offers, or show little interest once compensation is discussed, the available talent may not be the primary problem.
That does not mean every employer must outbid competitors. Compensation decisions have to reflect internal equity, budgets, and the economics of the role. But companies should understand the tradeoff they are making.
If the budget cannot move, something else may need to.
That could mean adjusting the experience requirement, widening the geographic search, reconsidering flexibility, redistributing some responsibilities, or developing a promising employee internally.
The important thing is to avoid searching indefinitely for a candidate profile that the current compensation package is unlikely to attract.
Consider Whether the Hiring Model Fits the Business Need
Some difficult searches are not candidate problems at all. They are workforce-design problems.
A company may be trying to make a permanent hire for work that is still evolving. A department may urgently need specialized expertise for an implementation but not need that expertise indefinitely. Another employer may want greater evidence of performance before committing to a permanent position.
Different circumstances call for different approaches.
Direct-hire is often the strongest fit when the need is clearly long-term, and the position requires continuity, specialized expertise, or leadership.
Contract staffing can provide targeted expertise for projects, implementations, backlogs, or periods of increased demand.
Temporary staffing can help maintain productivity during workload spikes, leaves, vacancies, and other short-term needs.
Temp-to-hire can be useful when employers want an opportunity to evaluate performance and fit in the actual work environment before making a permanent commitment.
Rather than treating these options as interchangeable, employers should start with the business problem and choose the workforce model that best addresses it.
Build Visibility Into Hard-to-Fill Talent Before You Need It
One of the hardest times to learn about a talent market is after a critical employee resigns.
Employers can reduce that risk by identifying positions that would be especially difficult to replace and periodically reviewing the external market for those skills.
Which roles have limited internal backups? Where would a vacancy immediately affect customers, financial reporting, technology, compliance, projects, or revenue? Which positions require combinations of skills that are already difficult to find?
Those are the areas where proactive talent planning matters most.
Maintaining relationships with previous finalists, developing internal successors, monitoring market compensation, and staying connected to specialized recruiting networks can all improve an employer’s options before a vacancy becomes urgent.
The objective is not to recruit for positions that do not exist. It is to understand where talent availability could become a business constraint.
More Applicants Are Not the Same as Better Hiring Options
Texas employers may see changing candidate availability as the labor market evolves, but specialized hiring will continue to require careful judgment.
When a position is difficult to fill, the answer is not always to generate more applications.
Sometimes the solution is expanding sourcing. Sometimes it is reconsidering a requirement. Sometimes compensation is the constraint. In other cases, the organization needs a different workforce model or a recruiter with stronger access to a specialized talent market.
The strongest hiring strategies begin by identifying which of those problems the employer actually has.
That allows hiring teams to broaden the talent pool where appropriate without compromising the capabilities that truly matter, and to make better decisions about the people who will support the organization’s performance and growth.
Need Help With a Hard-to-Fill Role?
If your team is struggling to find qualified talent for a specialized position, Burnett Specialists can help you evaluate the market and determine the right recruiting approach.
Burnett Specialists supports employers across Accounting & Finance, Administrative, Customer Service, Engineering, Executive Management, Human Resources, Information Technology, Legal, Marketing & Creative, Mortgage & Banking, Real Estate & Property Management, Sales & Business Development, Supply Chain & Logistics, and other critical functions through direct-hire, temporary, contract, temp-to-hire, and payrolling solutions.
