Raphael Bohne
Research expert covering professional services
Staffing industry worldwide - statistics & facts
The staffing industry includes organizations whose purpose is to locate and/or supply workers for other organizations. The revenue for the global staffing industry in 2022 reached almost 650 billion U.S dollars, following two years of continuous growth. The industry took a big hit during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, however revenue has bounced back to surpass pre-pandemic figures. The largest revenue segment of this industry was agency work, comprising approximately 75 percent of the market in 2021. Recruitment services constituted the remainder.
The role of staffing agencies
Staffing agencies arrange workers for limited term assignments at other organizations. The length of these assignments can vary greatly, with some being as short as a few hours while others lasting a year or more. One key difference between agency staffing and standard contract employment is that agency workers are paid by the agency, not the organization they are performing the work for. Agency workers are common across a variety of sectors, with the industrial sector and office support being generally the two largest. For example, these two sectors constitute over half the market in the United States when broken down by temporary and contract employees. The United States has led the way globally in terms of staffing industry revenue with significant growth amongst staffing firms recorded over the last several years.Industry leaders
Globally, the industry is dominated by three main multinational companies: Swiss firm Adecco, Dutch firm Randstad, and U.S. corporation ManpowerGroup. Each of these companies provides agency staffing, recruitment services, and a range of additional consulting and outsourcing options. The Adecco Group's workforce solutions division generated a revenue of almost 24 billion euros in 2022, whereas the staffing service line of Randstad created approximately 13 billion euros in the same year. To give some scale of the global reach of these industry leaders, ManpowerGroup had approximately 2,200 offices worldwide in 2022.
