CHICAGO - Two US auto giants, General Motors Co. (GM) and Ford Motor Co., plan to hire more than 3,000 salaried workers in 2013, Detroit News reported Friday.

This would represent Ford's largest single-year increase of salaried workers in more than a decade.

Ford said the most of the 2,200 workers it plans to hire this year will work in product development, information technology and manufacturing areas in southeast Michigan, while General Motors will add about 1,000 high-tech jobs in suburban Atlanta.

Ford's hiring comes in addition to 2,350 hourly jobs that Ford plans to add in southeast Michigan this year; most of those jobs will be at the Flat Rock Assembly Plant.

Meanwhile, GM said its new Information Technology Innovation Center in Georgia will employ software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts and other IT professionals. GM now has 700 workers working at its Innovation Centers in Austin, Texas, and Warren in Macomb County. GM plans to hire up to 1,500 for the center at its Warren Tech Center over the next four years.

Ford added about 8,100 hourly and salaried jobs in the US in 2012, including 1,000 jobs it moved from other countries.

These are signs that the US auto industry is recovering steadily and may have even picked up.

Ford has about 28,400 salaried workers throughout North America, most of them in the United States. That's 10,000 fewer than it had in 2006. The number of Ford salaried workers bottomed out around 25,000 in 2009 and has steadily risen since then.