While most search terms we talk about in this report have had big swings up and down, the search demand for staffing agencies has been Steady Eddie throughout. Employers have been cautious about hiring, but haven't turned their back on staffing agencies at any point.

In 2026, a rising search demand suggests that hiring intent has shifted from passive to active. The timing aligns with various analyst forecasts that suggest that 2026 and 2027 will see a return to growth for the broader staffing and temp labor service markets, especially now that companies have a slightly better sense of the shape of their digital transformation investments.

IT staffing revenue fell 6% in 2024 to $38.5 billion, with the number of firms qualifying for the SIA largest IT staffing firms list shrinking from 66 to 57 companies. It's easy to attribute this contraction to companies shedding talent after over-hiring during COVID, but that oversimplifies a bit. The private sector zeitgeist around AI reached a fever pitch last year, coupled with a one-two punch of inflation, tariffs, broadscale macroeconomic uncertainty, and low quits. Beyond that, companies in many cases took a wait-and-see approach to digital transformation and AI investment and/or restructuring, not understanding the outcomes or productivity impacts that operationalizing AI would yield, but also being unwilling to be left out in the cold should they stick to the tried-and-true manual processes of yesteryear.

The result was hiring paralysis. In late 2025, search demand exploded. Organizations that paused IT project investment while they researched and rapidly iterated on AI rollouts and formalized their strategic planning are now picking those plans back up, and they need tech talent to bring them to life. Operational change management is a herculean challenge for any enterprise, making the timeframe to execution long and somewhat fraught.

Commercial staffing (industrial + office/clerical) fell 9% in 2024 per SIA, despite a lot of talk around the perennial renaissance of American manufacturing being always around the corner. The reality is that manufacturing was in a stronger growth position in 2022-2024 than it is now, due to the chilling effect of tariffs and inflated materials prices. However, the notable exception here is data center expansion and the realization of manufacturing investments that were first forged years ago, and that's driving a lot of interest in certain sub-sectors.

While we don't know who exactly is searching for the term "commercial staffing," which is an underused term given the many synonyms used in staffing and its adjacent industries, we can assume it's buyers or investors considering how inaccessible that term is to the general candidate population. In other words, it's too inside baseball to be a common applicant term.

That bodes well for light industrial and commercial staffing, that is in a positive position, like healthcare, to benefit from a skilled labor shortage and increasing job demand. We don't know what impact AI will have on jobs yet though plenty of folks wax poetic about it. What we do know is that skilled tradespeople and healthcare workers have a pretty obvious physical moat.

The broad "healthcare staffing" search term tells the full market cycle in one line. It peaked in volume with travel nursing in early 2022 during the height of the COVID pandemic, when bill rates were high and hospitals relied heavily on healthcare staffing agencies to get as many clinicians to the bedside as possible as quickly as possible, then tracked the correction downward as hospitals rebuilt internal capacity and cut contract labor budgets. The hospital systems themselves went through a massive crisis as elective surgeries all but disappeared during the pandemic and facilities operated at a loss. As they return to stability now, the need for healthcare staffing agencies to provide highly qualified and specialized talent to a) appeal to the needs of the facilities and b) overcome the reputational damage that was done during the high bill rate days of COVID is increasing.

Unlike travel nursing, search traffic for healthcare staffing as a broad umbrella term didn't drop that far, and it's recovering faster. That's because it aggregates multiple market segments: travel nursing, locum tenens, per diem nursing, healthcare at-home, and allied health are all contributing to the recovery signal simultaneously. The composition of the market returning looks different from what left: more locum tenens, more allied health, more per diem, and a leaner travel nursing segment focused on sustained demand rather than crisis pricing.

Search interest climbed 130% off the floor in late 2025 before cooling in early 2026. That kind of move in search volume typically leads the actual market by 6 to 12 months; it's the canary in the coal mine if the canary actually enjoyed being inside a coal mine, which we imagine most canaries don't. The structural case for travel nursing never went away: 33% of U.S. nurses are nearing retirement age, and the BLS projects only a 9% increase in registered nurses by 2030, which would be not nearly enough to close the gap. Healthcare workers are burning out and policy is not incentivizing rural facility expansion or democratization of care access. Furthermore, the increased costs and penalties associated with H1-B visas and only recent retrogression have created unforeseen obstacles to bringing in skilled international clinical talent, only adding to the stresses on the system.

Federal legislation mandating nurse-to-patient ratios, if passed, would re-price the healthcare staffing market almost overnight. Whether that happens remains to be seen. For agencies, the window to rebuild travel nursing pipelines and reposition their relevance to health systems may already be open. The agencies that maintained relationships and compliance infrastructure through the correction are now positioned to move quickly as demand returns, as they're able to operate efficiently without burdensome overhead.

Locum tenens has been the healthiest segment in healthcare staffing over the last several years, and Google trends back it up. Unlike travel nursing, which has seen margin compression from MSP-driven business, fluctuating demand, walkbacks of policy that would have increased staffing volumes and provider-to-patient ratios, and increased competition and consolidation eat into revenue post pandemic, locum tenens continues to thrive.

When we interviewed Dr. John Mehall for our Ref Around the Edges podcast in 2025, he spoke to the compelling nature of locum tenens work amidst a burned-out, scarce, and overburdened physician population. Not only is locums work lucrative, but it bypasses the primary complaint that many physicians have, which is that they spend more time doing administrative work, onboarding, and "pajama time" than they do actually providing direct patient care and interaction. As no one has ever entered medicine because they enjoyed spreadsheets, this underscores the structural freedom that locums offers -- an opportunity to be in the action without doing all the admin stuff.

Ah, the ghost job. The phantom posting. The translucent veil of jobseeker frustration that has only recently been acknowledged in search and news.

For years, staffing agencies and companies have posted purportedly open roles to build candidate pipelines without necessarily having active job orders behind them as a fairly standard sourcing practice. It's good for agencies and hiring managers to know who's out there and who may be a fit for a role now or into the future. Or sometimes, an order is filled but the company or agency forgets to take down the listing.

But the practice of posting "ghost jobs" that are all smoke and mirrors, simply for the purpose of making a company look like they're busier and growing faster than they are, has reached a fever pitch to the chagrin of jobseekers everywhere.

Staffing agencies actually have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the growth of the ghost job by being explicitly transparent in their role postings, and appeal to the humanity of jobseekers with empathetic messaging that makes it clear that the rec is a) active, b) legitimate, and c) timely. This is a space in which timeboxed temp assignments can be a breath of fresh air to candidates who are being ignored in so many mediums.

During the pandemic, remote jobs burst into the scene as the new normal for knowledge workers, and overnight, going into the office every day became as stale for a sizeable chunk of the non-essential workforce as those almonds we left in our desk before lockdown. Obviously this shift didn't apply to healthcare personnel, grocery workers, delivery drivers, or public works professionals, which in some ways was a harbinger of things to come. If where knowledge workers performed their jobs could be so easily and immediately turned on its head, perhaps how they performed their jobs was soon to follow...

But keeping people out of an office had a lot of downstream consequences -- on restaurants, retail, transportation, commercial real estate, collaboration, onsite training, and recruiting. Remote listings have been shrinking since 2023 as companies tighten work-from-home policies, while search demand has stayed near its all-time high. Why? Because if a job can be done remotely at all, chances are the candidate for that job wants to do it remotely.

That gap between supply and demand creates a frustrated, restless candidate pool. Candidates are actively looking for jobs with flexibility and staffing firms to help them land those jobs. Even for clinical roles, which can rarely be done remotely, healthcare candidates are increasingly looking to automation and better onboarding technology to simplify their experience and allow them to move faster and more seamlessly into new assignments -- a byproduct of a rapid digital transformation that was stress-tested in 2020.

The continued interest in remote work suggests that staffing firms that can offer flexibility as well as unobtrusive and thoughtful candidate experiences will enjoy a competitive advantage regardless of whether the roles they recruit for can be done remotely or not.

"Quiet quitting" went from non-existent (because it's a made-up term) to the most-searched workforce phrase in America in about eight weeks in late 2022, driven by a viral TikTok and a media cycle that ran with it, and then it crashed just as fast. By early 2023 it was essentially gone. But when it was real, it was really real. Gallup research, for instance, showcased the worst job engagement numbers in a decade as that term gained steam, with employees doing the minimum to keep their jobs and paychecks. This phenomenon didn't come out of left field. The pandemic upended so many expectations around work and life, coupled with social movements around justice, equality, and human rights, alongside a very healthy job market (if you forget the 11.8 percent unemployment we saw in April 2020).

Search data in 2025 and 2026 tells a meaningfully different story. Professional and IT candidates are actively job hunting. Among some segments of the jobseeking population, especially in marketing and creative fields, there simply aren't enough jobs for the math to math. The talent market has shifted back toward employer power in many sectors. There are dozens of feature stories on professional and in some cases executive talent reskilling into trades roles, or pursuing temp and gig work to maintain access to pay and benefits.

For staffing agencies serving IT and professional segments on either the perm or contingent side, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, there is more highly qualified talent on the market than at any point since 2021. On the other hand, AI-generated resumes from desperate jobseekers trying to get through screening agents means that finding those top candidates is harder for recruiters than ever before.

Candidate fraud isn't new to the staffing industry. Recruiters have long taken average candidate resumes and made them look a little bit better than average. And lying about one's career achievements and embellishing one's skills and qualifications is not exactly a niche concept. It's the very reason RefAssured was started in the first place -- to prevent performance fraud.

But boy, what a year. The ubiquity of generative AI has made creating a convincing fake applicant profile trivially easy for almost anyone. The threats now include AI-generated resumes that perfectly match job descriptions, real-time deepfake video filters used in interviews, proxy applicants who pass the interview and then hand off the actual job to someone else, and synthetic personas assembled from stolen identity fragments. And the actors committing this fraud are also much scarier than in years past. Before, a candidate trying to circumvent a visa limitation might attempt to fabricate an identity, or someone might use another person's ID to pass a drug screen. These were single candidates acting on their own behalf. Now we have organized crime rings in North Korea and other geographies colluding to execute sophisticated, pervasive espionage and infiltrate Fortune 500 enterprises, hospital systems, and governmental agencies. It's a whole new world out there, with much higher stakes.

For staffing agencies, whose primary obligation to clients is to place high-quality talent and reduce risk, the consequences of submitting a fraudulent candidate have never been more severe. Sending fraudulent talent into the placement pipeline, even if they don't end up going on assignment, damages the client relationship, creates liability, and can permanently affect your agency brand. Imagine the conversation with a client if you have to claw back revenue or pull an associate before they're deployed on assignment because you discovered they're a threat actor. Or worse, imagine them actually making it to the worksite.

The search volume and interest around candidate fraud as a term tracks almost perfectly with ChatGPT's public release and the democratization of deepfake tools. This is an arms race, and right now, the only way to beat the threat actors at their own game is with tools purpose-built for the job.

The term "candidate sourcing" is having a moment. It's possible to read the "candidate sourcing" search surge as a talent scarcity signal. But outside of healthcare staffing, for which the talent shortages are well documented, candidate scarcity isn't the problem.

In IT, professional services, and commercial segments, the candidate pool is large; the quiet quitting era is over, the market has shifted back toward employers, and people are actively searching for new assignments and work. And for commercial and light industrial roles, more college-age and entry-level workers are exploring career pivots into skilled trades professions that may offer increased job security against AI-driven structural disruption.

There are plenty of fish in the sea. But some of those fish that seem like salmon from a distance are actually tilapia and screening tools can't tell the difference. After all, as Leo Lionni once famously said, "Fish is Fish."

The sourcing problem in 2025-2026 is a quality, verification, and validation problem. AI has flooded every application pipeline with perfectly keyword-matched resumes from AI tools, cover letters that read as authentic but are templated rinse-and-repeat nonsense, and applications from candidates who may not exist in the form their application describes. And not all of this is due to nefarious intent. A candidate may use a resume editing tool with the best of intentions but not realize that the end result makes them seem like they led a complex project when all they did was attend a meeting or two. It's disingenuous for sure, but not always malicious.

The sourcing surge tracks directly with recruiters and agencies actively looking for better methods to find quality talent that can do a job well: sourcing from networks and known connections rather than job boards, using reference checks for validated past performance insight from real human beings, re-engaging and redeploying candidates already in an agency's pipeline, and building verification steps into initial screening.

For clinical roles, especially locums, and for elite engineering roles and a handful of skilled trades, there's a genuine scarcity of talent. But for everyone else, the scarce resource is trustworthy signals in a noisy market. Agencies that have deep, verified candidate relationships have a structural advantage that almost nothing can replicate.

In 2024 and 2025, once ChatGPT hit the consumer mainstream and company valuations correlated directly with their perceived AI "nativeness," spurring exit multiples that seemed to defy the logic of feasible math, there was a mad dash to leveraging AI tools and operationalizing them rapidly.

From an investor perspective, companies in all sectors had to either a) become AI companies as far as what they were offering their customers externally for valuation purposes or b) prove that they were investing in AI internally to increase revenue and productivity per employee and operate more quickly at lower margin. The latter would likely involve restructuring in some capacity, either to eliminate internal talent that was deemed superfluous, or to bank resources towards more profitable pockets for future growth. This had both a positive and a negative impact on staffing agencies, who could either benefit from increased or decreased demand depending on their specialty talent segment and existing degree of diversification across staff augmentation/delivery and adjacent consulting and services.

And then the volume around "AI tools for recruiting" started to cool down a bit.

The search pullback doesn't mean that the market has lost faith in AI. Far from it. Adoption is high: roughly two-thirds of organizations now use some form of AI in recruitment, and that number continues to grow. The frenzied search for AI tools peaked when every staffing firm in the industry was simultaneously trying to evaluate the landscape at once, roughly mid-2025. We're now firmly into the second phase of the transformation process, which is generating outcomes and operationalizing the existing investments.

And that's the hard part. Lots of people can buy a car but it doesn't do much good unless you also know how to drive it and fit everyone in there comfortably.

The agencies winning in this environment are the ones who build workflows where AI translates meaningfully to recruiter output, and can navigate the biggest hurdle to AI or any type of technology adoption: internal change management. Winning hearts and minds and creating comfortable, workflow-native experiences are much greater challenges than finding a solution that has the slickest tagline.

Meanwhile, the AI arms race has created a new paradox: AI sourcing tools find more candidates, but AI-assisted applications make those candidates harder to evaluate on an apples-to-apples basis, which means trustworthy performance validation at the point of contact matters more than it ever has.

Employer of Record services solve a specific problem: a company wants to hire someone in a new country (or state) without setting up a legal entity and navigating local employment law, payroll tax, and benefits compliance. It's programmatic workforce management versus pure staff aug and sourcing, and many larger staffing agencies already provide EOR services, including Randstad, Adecco, Kelly, and more.

The search growth reflects the continued rise of global distributed contingent work and, more recently, companies looking for workforce flexibility in response to economic and trade policy uncertainty, but ultimately, it's really about creating simplicity and consistency for the client and the worker by having a stable intermediary absorb risk and streamline benefits, compliance, and payroll for talent.

The popularity of EOR does however signal the same trend we're seeing with hospitals and healthcare facilities' reliance on MSPs -- companies want reduced risk and a "front end" to navigating complexity. Why manage a bunch of staffing agency suppliers when a buyer could work with just one MSP? Why take on internal compliance risk and float payroll when an EOR can do it? Why keep up with changing international regulations when another entity has the resources to stay abreast of those?

Buyers are actively exploring ways to reduce the friction and risk of workforce expansion through a contiguous, streamlined experience. Agencies that emphasize experiential cohesion and create extensibility on the front end are better positioned regardless of which delivery model is in question.

Gig work was all the rage for twenty years as Uber and Instacart reshaped how work is delivered and ushered in a new era of the independent contractor, and resulting policy changes in turn. In the past several years, companies themselves have reduced their use of the term "gig economy" or "gig work" primarily because it feels almost cliche and tired now, considering that gig was always just a hip synonym for temp IC work.

But no one told the candidates, who are as excited about gig work as they have ever been. Perhaps even more now that permanent roles are so hard to come by, and full-time opportunities scarce.

Interest in gig economy jobs has long been high, but the late-2025 escalation to 100 likely reflects a combination of economic anxiety (tariff uncertainty, a cautious job market for permanent roles) and the rising cost of living that makes having multiple jobs, or gigs, necessary for many people just to make ends meet.

The important distinction for staffing is the user intent: this term is primarily searched by candidates, not employers. In other words, a lot of people are looking for work and they're willing to be creative and flexible in how they perform it. Agencies that can offer flexibility, technology that helps improve the candidate experience, from mobile onboarding to shift scheduling to day pay and benefits portals, are competing directly for this workforce segment against platform companies like Uber, Fiverr, and Instacart.

The popularity of RPO is really a reflection of large buyers' desire to unlock economies of scale in hiring, and to create consistency and uniformity in a way that ultimately reduces costs.

Why did RPO search demand explode in 2025? One obvious reason is that clients want more than pure staff augmentation, but also workforce process optimization, technology implementation and consultation, and total talent management. Another is that the RPO model, as it has matured and more providers have emerged, has become more accessible to a broader set of companies. Even mid-market businesses can now benefit from on-demand and project-based RPO models at starting costs that previously only large enterprises could justify.

Additionally, as hiring demand for permanent roles is expected to increase in 2026, companies that froze their internal TA teams during the economic downcycle are now evaluating whether to rebuild them or outsource them. Outsourcing allows for easy and painless flexing up and flexing down, either due to cyclical demands or simply as a matter of choice, in a way that building an internal team does not.

RPO providers are increasingly offering hybrid temp/perm models, and staffing agencies are increasingly offering RPO-adjacent services. The staffing agencies most at risk in light of the growing popularity of various delivery modalities are those with no clear competitive moat beyond filling job orders or having the "best people" in a way that they cannot actually prove with evidence.

Staying in one's lane, so to speak, used to be enough in staffing, but as these search terms come and go, what doesn't change is the need to navigate complexity, deliver more than just the basics, and differentiate on quality, risk reduction, value, and strategic partnership.