Christopher Ryan, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer
With all the hoopla about AI in recruiting, I thought it would be interesting to see how staffing agencies source talent today. Fortunately, given my role at Avionté, I can access aggregated, deidentified data from our AviontéBOLD platform. So recently, I pulled gross-profit data from tens of thousands of placements made in 2025 to answer a simple question: how are Avionté customers actually sourcing their talent?
To perform the analysis, I looked at sources of talent based on gross profit generated, rather than by counting individual placements. A $50K placement matters more to your business than a $5K one, and it’s pointless to count sourced talent that quits after three days.
Overall, the results confirm what industry experts and old-timers have said all along. Staffing is all about human connections and relationships.
“The consistent theme across the data is that human connections matter most. Technology can amplify connections. It can make you faster and more efficient. But it doesn’t replace the fact that people trust people they know and work for companies that treat them like individuals.”
Christopher RyanChief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Avionté
But before I get into the numbers, here’s a caveat. I’m working with inherently complex data. Every Avionté customer configures BOLD differently and tracks talent sources in their own way. Half the time, busy recruiters skip over the Talent Source field altogether, and entries are free-form text. Sometimes, the original source of talent overlaps with redeployment activities. When you aggregate data from 400+ agencies and 20,000+ recruiters, it’s a statistical minefield. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have even bothered with this analysis.
But AI changes the way we think about data. AI excels at reading and classifying haphazard text entries. I was able to clean up and cluster the extracted data in less than 30 minutes. It was like having my own personal assistant who could review each entry in the spreadsheet and place it in the right bucket. The results aren’t precise, but in the end, they still tell a powerful story.
When staffing agencies do report a talent source, here is how it breaks down.
More than one-third of gross profit comes from talent sourced by referrals. This makes perfect sense. Past performance is often the best predictor of future performance. Successfully placed talent tends to attract more of the same.
Job boards remain a primary source of talent, as well as a major cost center for staffing agencies. According to our data, Indeed owns about 75% of the job board volume, with other vendors like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Monster taking up the rest.
Having a local community presence generates a major source of talent. Walk-Ins alone account for half of this total—suggesting that Brick and Mortar agencies aren’t dead yet.
The staffing agency’s website and Facebook page, as well as Google search, are also major tools for sourcing talent. Deploying a high-quality, accessible website is an excellent way to cut down on third-party job board costs.
This final group is a smorgasbord of tools and techniques. Most notable among these are the select group of Avionté customers who extensively use Avionté mobile technology or chatbots to engage or re-engage talent. They made up the lion’s share of this group. Mass messaging tools, like text outreach, email marketing, and traditional advertising, are also included, but together they showed barely a blip.
What should we make of these numbers? Every agency captured in this dataset has its own distinct operating model. It’s a composite picture of hundreds of unique staffing operations—a mythical “average agency” that doesn’t exist in real life. For that reason, I think it would be a mistake to infer there’s one “right” way to source talent. If your agency looks different than these averages, there’s probably a good reason for it.
In aggregate, however, these numbers provide critical insight into the fundamental nature of staffing.
Add referrals (33.90%) and local community outreach (22.4%), and you’re looking at over 50% of gross profit coming from personal connections. Gumshoe staffing isn’t dead. It’s actually thriving.
The agency’s website, along with Facebook and Google, delivers results—provided you execute the fundamentals well.
The numbers are small now, but early adopters are seeing results. Most agencies haven’t embraced these tools yet.
Mass messaging is impersonal. Lists get stale. Spam filters block volume. People ignore it. The data confirms what we already know.
Agencies should closely track talent sources. Job boards are expensive, and anyone can use them. Other sources of talent are not only cheaper, but they can also differentiate your agency from the competition. Ideally, you should know which tools bring in the best new talent, and which tools are most effective in redeploying or reactivating proven talent.
Stepping back, we are on the brink of an AI revolution in staffing and recruiting. But the question I always come back to is how we put AI and automation to work in an industry inherently defined by people.
AI tools promise to automate sourcing, improve matching, and scale recruiting. Some of that promise is already being delivered—our mobile and chatbot data shows early traction, even if the numbers are small. But transformation doesn’t mean replacement. Sure, talent and recruiters are using AI, but their end goal remains the same—they both want to have a conversation with a real person.
The consistent theme across the data is that human connections matter most. Referrals, walk-ins, and conversations at job fairs—these generate placements because they’re based on real relationships. Technology can amplify connections. It can make you faster and more efficient. But it doesn’t replace the fact that people trust people they know and work for companies that treat them like individuals. Even the most tech-savvy Gen Z job seekers using AI tools and mobile phones expect a human connection at the end of their search.
The staffing agencies that thrive with AI will be the ones that use technology to strengthen what already works. If talent sourced from referrals drives a third of your gross profit, then maybe AI should help you manage and expand your referral network. If local community engagement delivers results, maybe the technology should make that outreach more targeted and trackable. The data tells me that staffing remains a relationship business. AI changes the tools, not the dynamic. The question isn’t whether AI will matter — it will. The question is how we want to put AI to work.
Christopher Ryan
Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Avionté
Christopher Ryan leads the Strategy and Marketing functions for Avionté. He brings more than three decades of consulting, thought leadership, and corporate experience in Human Capital Management. He has also written and spoken extensively about part-time and temporary workers, employee retention, gender pay equity, emerging trends in compensation, U.S. labor shortages, and the economic impact of the Affordable Care Act.
