StaffingHub’s 2026 State of Staffing Benchmarking Report surveyed staffing agency operators and found that 42% of agencies lost revenue in 2025. But the agencies that grew had three clear things in common: deeper AI adoption, stronger operational discipline, and a sourcing strategy built on owned channels rather than job boards.
Since 2016, StaffingHub has been a trusted source for data-driven insights into the staffing industry. Its latest 2026 State of Staffing Benchmarking Report, based on responses from agency leaders in executive, VP, director, and manager roles, paints a clear picture of a market under pressure.
For many agencies, 2025 was brutal. Forty-two percent reported declining revenue, and among those firms, one in five saw losses exceeding 30%. Healthcare staffing was hit hardest, with revenue contracting by 56%, compared with 39% across other verticals.
Yet despite these numbers, optimism remains surprisingly high. Sixty-nine percent of agencies that lost revenue in 2025 still project growth in 2026. Whether that confidence reflects stronger operating strategies or simple expectations of market recovery is, as the report notes, still an open question.
And the downturn was not universal. Nearly one-third of agencies grew by 11% or more. The difference was not in company size, recruiter compensation, or the speed with which firms responded to inbound leads.
The agencies outperforming the market shared something else: they consistently followed three practices that distinguished growth firms from everyone else.
Here’s a snapshot of what the data reveals.
The report’s central finding is blunt: growth in 2025 wasn’t random or due to luck. Three operational practices cleanly separated agencies that grew from those that shrank.
The window for AI experimentation is closing fast. In staffing, agencies are increasingly split into two groups: those using AI to drive growth and efficiency, and those falling behind without it.
The report clearly distinguishes between firms using AI across core workflows and those using it sparingly or not at all. Among agencies with no AI adoption, 56% reported revenue contraction in 2025.
That number steadily declined as AI usage expanded: 41% for agencies using AI in one to two processes, 34% for those using it in three to four, and just 31% for agencies deploying AI across five or more workflows. Heavy AI adopters were also more than twice as likely to fall into the high-growth category.
The strongest growth correlations came from practical, operational AI use cases: job description generation (2.7x more likely to be a growth agency), reporting and analytics (2.7x), recruiting chatbots (2.3x), and candidate qualification (2.2x). These are not experimental AI projects. They are workflow accelerators embedded directly in daily operations.
And yet, 46% of surveyed agencies still are not using AI in any process. The data suggests that this gap is becoming increasingly costly.
That urgency is reflected in agency priorities for the year ahead. Looking toward 2026, 39% of agencies ranked AI and automation as their top technology investment priority, 14 points ahead of system integrations, which ranked second at 25%.
The shift makes sense given the reported outcomes. Heavy AI adopters most often cited measurable improvements in both the candidate and recruiter experience. Agencies in the early stages of adoption, meanwhile, most often reported “no measurable impact yet,” suggesting that AI value compounds over time as adoption deepens across workflows.
Avionté CTO Odell Tuttle framed the stakes well in the report: “The next era of staffing technology isn’t about any single capability. It’s about intelligence that runs end-to-end. Every placement, every client interaction, every back-office process becomes a data point that makes the next decision smarter. The firms building on platforms with intelligence at their core will be compounding an advantage that simply can’t be matched.”
One of the clearest patterns in the report is that growth agencies operate with more structure, consistency, and operational accountability than contracting firms. Agencies in growth mode averaged 4.56 out of 7 on the report’s operational maturity index, while contracting agencies averaged just 3.56. That one-point gap separated firms gaining momentum from those losing it.
Agencies that ran three or fewer of these practices landed at or below the average for contracting firms.
But there is good news here. These aren’t expensive to fix. They’re process decisions, not technology purchases.
The score was based on seven operational practices:
Fifty percent of growth agencies say their top three sourcing mix is made entirely of owned channels, such as direct sourcing, internal databases, referrals, company websites, and social media, with no job board usage. That compares to 27% of flat- or slow-growth agencies and 31% of contracting agencies.
This points to a clear shift: growth agencies are pulling away from job boards and building sourcing engines around channels they control.
The gap becomes even more evident when looking at an agency’s reliance on job boards. Seventy-three percent of flat- or slow-growth agencies still include job boards among their top three sourcing channels, compared with 44% of growth agencies. And only 8% of growth agencies say job boards are their highest-converting source, versus 36% of slow-growth firms.
Referrals are the standout source. Thirty-nine percent of agencies say referrals are their best-performing source, and 64% include them among their top sourcing channels overall.
But most firms aren’t set up to scale these programs. Only 11% run an automated referral program, while 57% remain at “none” or “basic/manual.”
That gap is clear in the data. Non-contracting agencies are nearly twice as likely as contracting agencies to run structured referral programs, at 38% versus 23%.
Most agencies already know where their best candidates come from. They just haven’t built the systems to scale it.
One other finding also deserves a closer look: nearly half of all agencies, 48%, do not track their redeployment rate. That is a major blind spot.
Redeployment is one of the highest-leverage metrics in staffing. Placing a worker you already know, who already understands your process, costs a fraction of sourcing someone new. It shortens time-to-fill, reduces compliance risk, and strengthens the talent relationships that referral programs depend on.
And yet it is the second-least-tracked metric in the entire report, behind only client NPS. Agencies focused on owned sourcing and operational discipline cannot fully capitalize on either if they are not measuring how effectively they retain and redeploy the talent they have already placed.
Download the full report for additional findings, including how fill rates, time to fill, gross margin, and redeployment rates benchmark across agency sizes and verticals, and what agency operators say are their biggest challenges heading into the rest of 2026. Download the report here →
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