As staffing numbers continue to improve – we believe the big question becomes whether we are seeing improvement simply in correlation to the effects of COVID-19 or could we be seeing improvement from a recessionary perspective. Meaning, should the next few quarters still have us concerned about a fiscal recession?
For those new to this brief blog, the numbers reflected are based on an aggregation of hosted Avionté data from hundreds of customers across the US. We used a “same-store sales” approach to ensure the data is clean. All hours, assignments, and gross payroll are from transactions that were processed. These numbers reflect a Sunday end date of May 10th, 2020. We call this blog Avionté RAW, because we are emphasizing the “raw” data as opposed to inferring the meaning behind the data. Every staffing company is different and will draw conclusions based on their business model. We don’t exactly know what is going to happen next, but our hope is that this will offer insight as to where things have been and potentially where they may be headed.
The upshot for Week 19, was a mixed performance with Assignments and Hours being up, but total gross was down. Here are the numbers:
The significant Assignment increase represents the biggest Week over Week change in 2020, which is exciting to see. The Hours, however, while positive, was the smallest positive increase in the last four weeks. We believe the Gross Payroll drop could be more reflective of significant bi-Weekly activity (week 19 is an “off” week) than a major trend. Still, the sizable Assignment increase coupled with the smaller Gross Payroll increase could be a reflection of an increase in lower-paying assignments being filled – as supported by the mean Pay Rate dropping from $17.33 to $17.22.
The big highlight is that all three of these metrics showed a strong increase over the last four weeks.
Users
We are also tracking our distinct users as a proxy to see what staffing companies are thinking from an internal staff point of view. Week 18 showed a slight (-.7%) decline in WoW%, though the last four weeks have all been < +/- 1%. Overall, for the year, the mean user count has declined by 22.6%. We would expect staffing companies to be cautious themselves on re-hiring internal staff.
Graphs
For this week, we have started to apply a Business Intelligence tool – Sisense – to our aggregated data. The x-axis refers to the week number of 2020. We just finished week 19. The y-axis labels have been removed for privacy and scale reasons.
For a Year over Year comparison – here is a graph of hours for customers since 2018:
States
New for this week is a listing of hours for each state, broken down by WoW, last four weeks, and YTD change. The state is where the work was performed (customer worksite) and we’ve only included states where we have substantial hours, to help display trending. Note, these numbers still have the potential to be skewed by large bi-weekly payrolls or similar big swings.
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be adding more Billing metrics as well as waiting for the weekend to pull complete prior week’s data.
In addition, we have added COVID-19 Resources to the Avionté Knowledge Base. This resource center provides information from across the US and Canada that could affect how you do business. Check it frequently for the latest information and business trends occurring during these challenging times.
About Avionté
Avionté is a leader in enterprise staffing and recruiting software solutions, offering innovative end-to-end staffing solutions to over 900 customers and 25,000 users throughout the U.S. and Canada. Avionté delivers a robust platform for clerical, light industrial, IT, and professional staffing firms to maximize profits and boost productivity.
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