Most Houston business leaders surveyed by Murray Resources, a local recruiting and staffing agency, believe 2012 will be a better year than 2011.

Murray resources recently surveyed 60 Houston executives, hiring managers and human relations staff members to determine the business climate outlook for 2012.

“(The survey) showed that there is a cautious optimism,” said Keith Wolf, Murray’s vice president of marketing. “Businesses are hiring, they want their businesses to grow and they expect next year to be better.”

The majority of survey respondents — 61.7 percent — said they expect overall prospects for their companies to get moderately better. Surprisingly, no one said their company’s prospects would significantly worsen in 2012.

Respondents also said they expected to see their company’s headcount increase in the next year. Some 66.7 percent of respondents said their companies would increase staff by significant or moderate numbers.

Areas where most respondents expect to increase hiring are in the operations, sales and engineering fields.

However, one of the greatest challenges respondents expressed when hiring new employees was finding qualified candidates.

“There is a misunderstanding that if there is high unemployment, there are great candidates,” Wolf said. “These companies are looking for very specific skills.”

Although the overall outlook for Houston is good, many companies are cautious because of worldwide economic instability, Wolf said. Still, he said he expects Houston to be able to continue to weather most rocky economic occurrences, as it has done in the past.