At the time of this writing, the US is in the midst of nationwide, civil unrest. This blog is only about staffing data. As noted before, we do worry about a technical recession after the economy starts to recover from the COVID, event-driven drop. Being in the Minneapolis area, many of our go-to retailers were closed for fear of looting. If the protests/unrest goes on for a significant amount of time, we’re concerned about the downward pressure on the economy.
On to week 21 – we don’t want to start sounding like a broken record, but our nationwide assignment went up by 4.3%, the largest week over week increase in 2020. We thought the high bar of growth would be around 3% — happy to see that level broken! That moved the four week change to over 10%!
For those new to the Avionté RAW series, 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 24th, 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.
In addition to the very strong and significantly positive Assignment numbers, Hours and Gross Wages, here are the numbers:
Week 21 was an “off” week on the primary bi-weekly cycle. In looking at Gross Payroll to Week 19 – we are seeing a 5.3% increase in those two weeks.
We think a trend to keep watching is the hours/assignment ratio. For week 21, we saw an average of 32.43 hours per assignment, the lowest since week 15.
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 21 showed a slight decrease (-.6%), the first decline since week 16. Staffing companies are hiring slower than the Assignment/Hours growth rates, as expected.
Graphs
Rate of Change
For this week, we thought it would be good to start looking at the rate of change for each week. Clearly, we are trending up – but are we gaining momentum or staying pretty consistent?
For a Year over Year comparison – here is a graph of hours for customers since 2018:
States
We also like to show the individual state performance. The state is where the work was performed (customer worksite) and we’ve only included states where we have substantial hours (> 10,000), to help display trending. Note, these numbers still have the potential to be skewed by large bi-weekly payrolls or similar big swings.
*Grey areas not reported due to insufficient data
Written by, John Long, Avionté, Founder and Co-Chairman
In addition, we have added COVID-19 Resources to our website. 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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