“We’re still looking at some job growth, but it’s slowing down,” said Dan Henry, chairman of the board of the Northeast Human Resources Association.

/ Courtesy of Northeast Human Resources

Companies in the Northeast will be hiring new employees this year — but not as many as last year.

According to recent survey conducted by the Northeast Human Resources Association, 54 percent of the 224 companies participating in the poll anticipated that their full-time employees would increase. Another 37 percent said their company would remain at the same staffing level, and only 8.5 percent expect a decrease.

Last year, 65 percent of the companies in the poll were expecting to increase their work force.

More than 71 percent of the companies in the poll expect their recruiting budgets for new hires to remain the same as last year, 18 percent expect their recruiting budgets to increase and 11 percent predict a decrease. Again, the numbers are not as positive as last year, when 35 percent of the companies were expecting an increase and only 6 percent expected a decrease.

“We’re still looking at some job growth, but it’s slowing down,” said Dan Henry, chairman of the board of the Northeast Human Resources Association. Henry is also chief human resources officer for Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a Watertown, Mass., company that gets hired by corporations to help employees with work/family conflicts, such as childcare.

Henry said that recruiting the best talent remains the top priority for human resource professionals in the region. Companies overwhelmingly use their own human resource staffs for hiring. The more senior and specialized the job, he said, the more likely a company is to turn to an outside search firm. “These are the people who will not have a resumé on Monster,” he said, referring to the Internet job site monster.com.

Referrals from current employees and Internet job boards are the two most likely methods companies use to identify job candidates. Henry said companies can use job boards in two different ways, either by posting available jobs and seeing who responds, or looking through existing resumés on the job board to see what candidates are available. Many companies do both.

Other ways of seeking candidates include posting positions on a company’s own Web site, using trade associations or other nonprofit organizations, college recruiting or internships, and print advertising.

Internal checks of resumés and references remain the most popular preemployment screening method. Slightly more the two-thirds of the companies polled (67 percent) use criminal record checks; about a quarter of the firms in the poll use credit checks (27 percent) and drug testing (27 percent) before hiring.

Henry said the entire hiring process is increasingly going online. More than 50 percent of the companies — up from 45 percent last year — use applicant tracking systems, computer software that used to manage job candidates. An applicant tracking system can be used to post job openings, screen resumés, and generate interview requests by e-mail. The smartest companies, Henry said, are the ones who can also incorporate a human touch into the process.

The survey found that after hiring, only 21 percent of the organizations polled reported following up with post-hiring surveys, and most were focused on the applicant’s opinion of the interview process.

Henry said that figure might be artificially low, since the survey was mostly concerned with recruiting, and post-hiring assessments on, say, job satisfaction might be the responsibility of other departments within a company.

asmith@projo.com