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Three weeks ago, on this show, I told you temp jobs had grown every single month this year. 68,000 of them. Then the Oct. 2 jobs report revised the summer, and the government took a third of that back. So Ep. 85 opens with a correction. It also opens with a contradiction. September was the worst month of the year for temp jobs: down 10,900. Four days later, the SIA | Bullhorn indicator had staffing hours at their high for 2026, with industrial up 15% on last year. Which is it? Both. There isn't one staffing industry right now. There are two. What's in it: → The correction, in full. July went from +5,200 to −10,000. August, from +6,800 to +200. Net temp jobs added this year: about 35,000 — roughly half of what I cited on Sept. 18. Lesson for me: I don't hang an argument on one month of that series again. → The two tracks. SIA raised its industrial staffing forecast from 1% growth to 7%, then said firms are "generally recording either low single-digit growth or strong double-digit gains," with "little in between." The forecast is seven. Almost nobody is seven. → Utah, from the inside. SIA puts about half of planned data-center capacity in four states, and I live in one of them. The University of Utah's Gardner Institute counted 48 data centers running here this spring, with nearly three times their capacity under construction — and projects 2,000 to 3,250 permanent data-center jobs statewide by 2030. In a state with 3.5% unemployment. An address isn't a bench. → The constraint flipped. In SIA's latest survey, recruiting difficulty hit a four-year high and pulled even with sales difficulty. One executive: "Business is there; talent is not." And when Aerotek asked job seekers what hurt their search most, 44% said not hearing back. 17% said AI. → Where we pointed AI at YES: at the silence. What it does, why a person still makes the decision every time, and what I'd do in a different order if I were starting over. One format change. I didn't save the "so what do I do" for the end. Every part has a "what I'd do Monday," and the full playbook still closes the show. The average is lying to you. The question this quarter isn't "is the industry recovering." It's "which industry am I in." Staffing World is next week in Denver. Take that question with you. Ep. 85 drops Friday, Oct. 9 at 12:30 PM MDT.

Most staffing firms don't have a sales problem. They have a system problem. That's the one-line version of Ep. 84 of The Staffing Playbook, and my guest has spent the last ten years diagnosing that difference inside staffing firms. Shad Tidler of Lushin, a Sandler-powered sales training firm out of Indianapolis, brought a framework with him: the Four S's of Sales Growth — Strategy, Structure, Staff, and Skills. We walk all four, and I spend most of the hour pressure-testing it against light-industrial reality. A few things we get into: → Why Structure and Staff are where most firms actually break (not Skills, the one everybody reaches for first) → How to get from a million-dollar GP goal in January to what a BDM should be doing on Tuesday morning → The industry irony: staffing firms hire for a living and still can't hire their own salespeople → The difference between coaching a pipeline and managing it from behind a laptop (I have a story about that one) → A 60-second self-diagnosis to figure out which S is your bottleneck If you run a sales team in this industry — RVP, VP of Sales, or the owner who still carries the bag — this one's for you. And if you're heading to Staffing World in Denver next month, go see Shad live. He's teaching "Stop Leaving Money on the Table: How to Engage With Your Current Clients" on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 10:45–11:45 AM at the Gaylord Rockies. The podcast is about building the engine for new revenue. His session is about the revenue already sitting inside your accounts. Do both. Ep. 84 drops Thursday, Sept. 24 at 9:00 AM MDT. Link in the comments. #StaffingIndustry #Staffing #SalesLeadership #StaffingWorld #TheStaffingPlaybook

The staffing industry is growing for the first time in three years. On Wednesday, the Fed raised rates for the first time in three years. Same week. That's the whole episode. A solo briefing, recorded Wednesday afternoon after the decision, on what it means to be recovering straight into a rate hike — if you run a desk, a branch, or a book of business. What's in it: → SIA tripled its 2026 forecast — from +0.8% to +2.4%, about $183 billion — and industrial just became the largest segment in the industry. Then the honest version: indexed to 2019, commercial staffing is still 15% below where it was seven years ago, and the industry is still roughly a quarter below its 2022 peak. We're climbing out, not breaking out. → Why it's growing, and why that should make you a little nervous. Industrial employment is falling year over year while industrial staffing hours are up 12%. That's not a rising tide. That's clients choosing flexibility — and share that's chosen can be un-chosen. → The hike itself: a quarter point to 3.75–4.00%, unanimous, with one more penciled in for this year. Inflation at 3.4%, gasoline up 27%, diesel at a record. What that does to your rate-sensitive manufacturing clients, what it doesn't do to the data center down the road, and why a frozen labor market is a temp market. → The number nobody's talking about while they celebrate revenue: every public staffing firm reported margin down this summer. Pay rates are outrunning bill rates. A recovery you can't price is a recovery you can't keep. → A Monday playbook: reprice before Q4, sort your book by rate sensitivity, sell overtime relief, chase the data-center backfill instead of the site, and build a fuel plan for your associates before attendance tells you to. A rate hike isn't the end of the recovery. It's the next sorting event. The last three years sorted this industry once — the firms that leaned in while everyone pulled back are the ones taking share right now. Wednesday started round two. It's National Staffing Employee Week. If you run a branch, go thank an associate. Everything above is downstream of them showing up. The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES Episode's live this morning at 8:00 AM MDT. Link in the comments. Staffing Industry Analysts American Staffing Association

He stood up in a room full of staffing leaders who'd spent all day saying AI is the future of this industry, and asked two questions: "How many of you in this room are technologists?" "And where are your CTOs?" Nobody raised a hand. That silence is the whole episode. Daniel Mastropolo runs a large staffing firm with about 20 people and no office — the #1 fastest-growing staffing company in the country. He also spent five years as a fractional CTO to 17 firms. So when he says our industry is an easy mark for tech vendors, he's not guessing. A few things he said out loud that most people only think: → 200+ AI products flooding a market that knows it's a bad buyer of tech → "We sit on top of Bullhorn" is not an answer. Ask what "sit on" means. They usually can't tell you. → Ask a vendor for their bias statement. If you get a cross-eyed look — run. → Most owners have no idea what's actually sitting in their own data. His Monday-morning advice for owners: if you've been hesitant to go down the path of technical independence, your clock is running out. It can't be a toe in the water. Ep. 83 | Where are all the CTOs in Staffing? Wednesday, Sept 10 · 11:30 AM MDT The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES Know someone about to write a check for software they can't define? Send it to them. hashtag#StaffingIndustry hashtag#TheStaffingPlaybook

Payrolls went negative in July. Temporary help went up. Not by much — 3,400 jobs. But that number did something no temp help print has done in 45 months. It put this industry into year-over-year growth for the first time since October 2022. Same week, the ISM manufacturing employment index crossed 50 for the first time in 33 months. Two multi-year losing streaks broke in the same seven days. Both of them in light industrial. In a report the headlines called bad. Here's what I think is happening. When employers stop hiring but haven't started firing, they don't stop needing the work done. They rent instead of buy. Right now, we're what they're renting. New episode is up. The July jobs report and the number under the headline that nobody put in a headline. The weekly tape that hit a new high and decelerated at the same time. Three earnings prints, including a margin trap that every growing firm should look at. And the Fed study that finally measured what AI has actually delivered. Plus one correction I owe an economist.

Waiting for the staffing market to "bounce back" has quietly become a strategy. It might also be the wrong one. What if 2022 was the peak — and we don't get back to it? That's the question at the center of the next episode of The Staffing Playbook, and I brought on the one person with the data to actually answer it: Eric Gregg, co-founder and CX strategist at ClearlyRated. Eric has spent two decades — and millions of surveys — studying how staffing buyers and candidates actually behave. His newest research says the ground has shifted under all of us, on both sides of the table. On the buyer side: most now start with a short list of about three firms already in their heads — and they hire off that list. Miss it, and you didn't lose the deal. You never knew it existed. On the candidate side: they can write the resume, parse the job description, and prep for the interview with AI before a recruiter ever crosses their mind. Staffing has gone from the first call to one of the last. So the real question isn't "when does it come back?" It's this: how do you grow when the tide isn't lifting anyone — and what is the human recruiter actually still for? We get into: → Why specialization matters more than it ever has — and what it has to look like now → Where the human still wins once a machine can do the transactional work → The one finding in Eric's data that stopped me cold — it looks like it kills the "humans are irreplaceable" argument, until you look closer → How you earn a spot on that three-firm short list Real data. No hype. Same as always.

Three weeks ago, US staffing hours printed down 2%. Commercial, down 4. The word "stall" started showing up in headlines. The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-staffing-playbook-podcast/) Last Tuesday, the same indicator printed up 11%. Industrial — up 19%. Here's the thing: both numbers had a holiday in them. Ep. 80 of The Staffing Playbook is about the most whipsawed month this industry's tape has had all year — and how an operator reads it without getting shaken out: → SIA's brand-new Staffing Confidence Index debuting at a four-year high — three weeks before the hours data agreed with it → Three calendar distortions in three months (a tariff-shocked base, Juneteenth, a Saturday July 4th) — and the one segment signal that survived all of them → Why orders lead and hours lag — and how the firms watching orders never panicked → ManpowerGroup's Q2: back to profit, guidance up, and a 26% one-day repricing of the entire recovery → The AI layoff paradox: AI led cited layoff reasons for the fourth straight month — almost entirely in white-collar tech. The warehouse isn't in the data. → And per ManpowerGroup's own research: 90% of companies now use AI in hiring. Fewer than 5% say it's working. Tuesday's print — the first clean, no-holiday week in over a month — settled it: +8% overall, industrial +14%. That's not a mixed picture. That's a market turning. Ep. 80 drops Thursday, July 23 at 11:30 AM MDT. If you know someone who runs a branch and got whipsawed by that June tape, send it to them.

Last week, staffing-industry confidence hit its highest level since the pandemic.   The same week, the June jobs report landed at 57,000 — less than half what Wall Street expected, and the weakest month of hiring since winter.   Both are true. That contradiction is the whole episode.   Thursday I'm going live with a news-and-trends breakdown — the headlines that actually matter if you run a desk, a branch, or a book of business, and what the data underneath them really says.   We'll get into:   → Why unemployment "dropped" for the wrong reason → Two respected economists who read the exact same jobs report and reached completely opposite conclusions → The AI story that finally came with hard data this month — and the legal bill starting to land beside it → What this week's M&A moves reveal about what buyers are really paying for → Whether light industrial — the lane that led the recovery — is quietly cooling off   No hype, no doom. Just the numbers, the caveats named out loud, and the Monday-morning playbook.

Here's a number that should make every staffing leader uncomfortable: 0.6%. That's what the average staffing firm spends on marketing as a percentage of revenue. We spend three times more on rent than we do telling our own story to the market. The B2B companies we compete with for budget? They spend 9–10%. That's a 15x gap. And here's the part that stings. Three straight down years. And when Bullhorn asked firms their #1 priority for 2025, the answer was overwhelmingly "attract new clients." We named the problem — and refused to fund the one function whose job is to solve it. That paradox is the whole episode. I sat down with Ashley Bowlin for this one. Twenty years on both sides of this thing — marketing seats inside staffing firms, then the tech-vendor side at Herefish, Tracker, and CloudCall, now VP of Marketing at Top Echelon. She has an unusual amount of permission to tell the truth about it, and she did. A few things she said I haven't stopped thinking about: The era of referrals, networks, and donut drops isn't gone, but it's not enough anymore. Now it's about how people — and robots — discover you online. "We'll take job orders from anyone" is the tell. It's not strength. It means you've never done the work on who you're actually trying to reach. Marketing gets cut first because most marketers don't speak CFO. Impressions and likes don't survive a budget meeting. GP per source, acquisition cost, lifetime value — those do. And the one that landed hardest: in most firms, the only time sales and marketing talk is when somebody sent a bad lead. Then Ashley did something live on the recording I loved. She opened ChatGPT and asked it to build a hyper-targeted prospect list — IT contractors, Midwest, companies with 15+ roles open past 60 days. It came back with 20 real companies. Then it told her she was thinking too small and handed her a sharper set of buying signals to target instead. Her point: if you think you can skip that because you've done this for 20 years, you're going to get out-prospected by a junior who's been at it six months. The freeze is turning to a thaw. The firms waiting for the market to go "back to normal" are going to be disappointed — because nothing about how buyers find you is the same.

An accountant who's never written a line of code just matched a software engineer at coding — within 7 points. That's not a typo. Anthropic studied 400,000 sessions of people working with AI agents, and the credential we've screened for, for decades, barely predicted who succeeded. What predicted it? Whether the person understood the problem well enough to know when the machine was wrong. Not the degree. The judgment. And I'm not theorizing about this — I'm watching it happen inside my own walls. Our payroll team took a client process that used to eat 16 hours a week and got it down to 15 minutes. Our CFO built a budgeting and forecasting system from scratch. Our IT helpdesk associate got fed up with the software we were paying for and just… built her own. None of them are engineers. Every one of them is a domain expert who finally got a tool that could keep up with what they already knew. In Episode 77, I connect that study to our own industry's 2026 numbers — why 42% of agencies lost revenue last year while nearly a third grew double digits, and why the thing that separated them wasn't size, pay, or how fast they answered a lead. For twenty years, staffing sold access. Access just got cheap. What's left to compete on is what you know — and how well you direct it. The Staffing Playbook — Ep. 77: "It's Not the Credential, It's the Judgment"

Everyone keeps saying the same thing in staffing right now: “Add value.” “Be a trusted advisor.” “Stop competing on price.” I agree with the message. But I’m tired of the buzzwords. The real question is: what does value actually look like when every staffing firm has access to the same tools, the same AI, the same ATS, and the same automation? That’s what I’m digging into with Kim Henderson, MBA, PMP on Episode 76 of The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES Ep. 76 | The End of Fake Differentiation Kim has been on the show more than any other guest, and for good reason. She brings the kind of practical, no-fluff perspective our industry needs right now. In this episode, we talk about: ✅ Why being a “generalist vendor” keeps you stuck as a commodity ✅ What real differentiation looks like in 2026 ✅ How staffing firms can create value without adding expensive tools ✅ Why client education, visibility, and specialization matter more than ever ✅ How to move from transactional vendor to true business partner The firms that win the rest of 2026 will not be the ones simply saying they add value. They’ll be the ones proving it.

The hardest jobs might just be the safest jobs. In Episode 75 of The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES, I’m breaking down what the latest staffing trends are telling us right now. Industrial staffing is showing signs of life, but let’s be honest — “up” doesn’t automatically mean “booming.” After one of the toughest stretches our industry has seen in years, the firms that are winning are not the ones waiting for the market to save them. They are the ones leaning into the work that still requires judgment, trust, speed, and human execution. Warehouses. Production floors. Distribution centers. CDL drivers. Forklift operators. Line leads. The harder the job is to automate, the more durable the opportunity becomes. In this solo episode, I talk about: ✅ Why industrial staffing is leading the recovery ✅ Why office and clerical staffing is telling a different story ✅ How AI is changing the top of the funnel ✅ Why human judgment is becoming more valuable, not less ✅ What staffing firms should be paying attention to right now No fluff. No panic. Just the real trends and what they mean for operators, sales leaders, and staffing executives.

Most firms rolled out AI to 50 recruiters on a Monday. By Friday, they're using it to clean up emails. That's not adoption. That's an expensive mailing list. New episode of The Staffing Playbook — Part 2 with Jason Alexander of ChiefAI. He scaled staffing companies to $100M before he ever built an AI roadmap, so he knows the difference between buying a tool and actually using it. The frame: giving a recruiter an AI agent is like handing them an intern. Most recruiters were never taught to delegate.  So we asked the harder question — what happens when the intern outgrows the manager? What we got into: → Only 28% of employees know how to actually use their company's AI tools. → The shift from "doer" to "quarterback." → The veteran problem: your top biller thinks AI is a fad. How do you bring them along without losing them? → Why leaders who talk AI but don't use it get found out. Jason's advice for anyone who's never opened these tools — your first prompt is: "I'm a recruiter. How do I use you?" For me, the proof it's working wasn't a dashboard. It was a recruiter saying, "I filled all my roles, my interviews are done — I think I'll go visit some clients." That's the whole game.

Travel agents in 2001 still had full calendars. Their managers were happy. Their numbers looked fine. The hollowing-out had already started — they just couldn't see it from the inside. When the next downturn hit, the role got restacked overnight. That's the shape of what's happening in staffing right now. Stable on the surface. Foundation already changing underneath. In Ep. 73 of The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES, I walk through a 60-minute career audit — TCLD — that every recruiter, ops lead, and executive should run on themselves while they still have agency. T = Theater C = Commodity L = On the Line D = Durable Most people find T + C is a much bigger slice of their week than they're comfortable admitting. And that's the slice sitting on the thinnest ice. This isn't about AI taking your job in a clean replacement event. It's about the parts of the work that were quietly propping up the rest of the story you tell yourself about your value.

Everyone in staffing is talking about AI. Almost nobody is looking at the actual data. I spent the last two weeks pulling numbers from SIA, ASA, Bullhorn's GRID report, and Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. What I found was a story that neither the optimists nor the doomsayers are telling. The staffing industry did $184 billion in US revenue in 2024. Then 2025 hit — temp employment dropped 8.5%. Revenue contracted. And quietly, behind the headlines, something structural shifted. Entry-level employment in AI-exposed roles fell 13%. Senior-level employment in those same roles grew 6–12%. Staffing firms using AI are now 4x more likely to be top performers. And 22% of the highest-growth firms are filling orders in 3 days or less. The middle is disappearing. Not the middle class — the middle tier of staffing firms. The ones that are "competent enough" but haven't changed how they operate. I recorded a solo episode breaking all of this down — the data, what it means, and exactly what I think staffing leaders need to do about it.