The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES

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 partnerThe 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 nowNo 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 = TheaterC = CommodityL = On the LineD = DurableMost 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.