The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES

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.

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.

The staffing firms winning right now aren't making more calls — they're making better ones. And the ones falling behind? They don't have a sales problem. They have a control problem.In Episode 71, I sat down with two industry heavyweights to break down exactly where deals die — and what to fix first:Jamie Lupo — 20+ years in staffing, 18 at LHH where she rose to VP of Strategy. She rebuilt flatlined offices into record-breakers and recently launched Lupo Advisory to help small and midsize staffing firms sharpen their sales execution and go-to-market strategy. Jamie doesn't sugarcoat it: if your reps are "waiting to hear back," you're already losing.Valentine Kapture — 15+ years in staffing strategy and analytics, also an LHH and Robert Half alum. He launched KAPTURE to bring Fortune 500-level AI and workflow automation to the small and midsize staffing firms that need it most.Here's what we got into:→ Why sales-recruiting alignment is where staffing firms go to die → The discovery question gap that's killing your close rate → How one team hit their highest temps-out in 4 weeks by fixing their data → Where AI removes the drag vs. where it needs to stay out of the way → Why every irrelevant touch trains the buyer to ignore you → A 7-day challenge you can start tomorrowThis one is tactical. No fluff. Just the plays.📅 Thursday, April 16th | 1:00 PM MDT

Most staffing firms don't have an AI problem.They have a utilization problem.They're buying tools they never fully implement. Stacking subscriptions nobody uses. Chasing the next shiny platform before they've squeezed value out of what's already on the shelf.My next guest lived this firsthand.Jason Alexander was the #1 sales rep globally at Robert Half. He co-founded and scaled BANKW Staffing to $100M in revenue. His own business partner used to call him the easiest sale in the world when it came to buying new software.Now he runs ChiefAI and helps staffing firms stop the bleeding — starting with what they already have.On Episode 70 of The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES, Jason breaks down:→ Why 95% of the firms he assesses don't even have a business plan, let alone an AI roadmap
→ The AI agent he built that creates a 3-year rollout plan in 15 minutes
→ Why you should "bleed ChatGPT dry" before you buy anything else
→ What custom GPTs are and why almost nobody paying for ChatGPT is using them
→ The difference between handing a recruiter an AI tool and actually training them to use it
This one is packed with tactics you can act on today — not next quarter.