This report analyses the state of the recruitment agency market: market size, the leading firms, where the money actually sits geographically, who gets placed, and what technology is doing to agency economics.

Updated with full-year 2025 results and 2026 forecasts. This matters, because the original September 2024 version of this report got the direction of the market wrong. It described an industry in growth. The measured data now available shows the opposite: global staffing revenue has fallen in each of the last three years. We have corrected those figures and explained the error below, because the mistake we made is the same mistake most recruitment market content still makes.

Table of Contents

1. Global Recruitment Industry Overview
2. Market Size and Growth
3. Leading Recruitment Agencies
4. Geographical Distribution
5. Employment in the Recruitment Sector
6. Most Recruited Roles
7. Technological Advancements in Recruitment
8. Future Outlook and Trends
9. Conclusion

1. Global Recruitment Industry Overview

The recruitment industry connects businesses with talent across permanent, temporary and contract work. It is larger and more fragmented than most people assume, and it is dominated at the top by a handful of firms that still only account for a tenth of global revenue.

Key facts about the global recruitment industry:

• Around 230,000 staffing companies operate globally, generating close to €580 billion in revenue (World Employment Confederation, Economic Report 2023, based on 2021 data). An earlier WEC report put the figure at roughly 160,000 private employment agencies employing 2.4 million internal staff, and that older number is the one still recycled across the web.
• Private employment agencies placed 61 million people into jobs in 2024, split between 58.4 million through temporary agency work and 2.5 million through direct recruitment (WEC Industry Impact Report 2026).
• 86% of those assignments were full-time roles, and roughly 23% of temporary agency workers received an offer of a permanent contract.
• Leading firms: Randstad, the Adecco Group, ManpowerGroup, Allegis Group and Recruit Holdings.

The most important structural fact in that list is the third bullet's neighbour: agencies placed about one million more people in 2024 than in 2023, while industry revenue fell 4.2%. Volume held up. Price and mix did not. Agencies placed more people for less money, which is the single best one-line summary of the last three years.

2. Market Size and Growth

This is the section where most recruitment market reports, including our own first version, go wrong. There are two very different kinds of number in circulation, and they disagree violently.

What the industry actually measured

Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) is the industry's standard source and measures firm-level revenue rather than modelling it. Its figures:

• 2024 global staffing revenue: $620 billion, down 5% year on year.
• Revenue at the 100 largest staffing firms globally: $285.3 billion in 2022, $269 billion in 2023 (down 7%), $257 billion in 2024 (down 3%).
• The 100 largest firms represent roughly 41% of global staffing revenue. The top three alone account for about 10%.

Three consecutive down years. That is the actual shape of the market.

What the market-research mills projected

The most widely cited recruitment market figure online comes from The Insight Partners, published in August 2024: a staffing and recruitment market of $757.56 billion in 2023, reaching $2,031.34 billion by 2031, at a 13.1% CAGR. That projection is real and correctly quoted. It is also, on the evidence, wrong.

A 13.1% compound growth rate from a 2023 base requires the market to be roughly $970 billion by the end of 2025. SIA measured $620 billion in 2024, falling. The first two years of that forecast window went in the opposite direction to the forecast, at a scale that no rounding or definitional difference explains.

The lesson for anyone building a business case on this industry: syndicated market-research CAGRs are marketing collateral for the reports themselves. They are generated to be quotable, they are rarely revised when reality diverges, and they get laundered into credibility by every blog that repeats them. Use measured firm-level data (SIA, WEC, the American Staffing Association, and the audited accounts of the listed players) and treat any double-digit CAGR for a mature labour-market intermediary with suspicion.

Correction: what this report said in 2024

The original version of this report claimed the Adecco Group grew revenue 4.5% in 2023 and Randstad grew 4.1%. Both are wrong. Adecco's FY2023 revenue was €24.0 billion, up 1.3% as reported (up 3% on an organic, trading-days-adjusted basis). Randstad's FY2023 revenue was €25.4 billion, down 7.8%. It also cited a claim that 91% of recruitment leaders expected 10% to 20% growth in 2024, which we have been unable to trace to a primary source and have removed.

The United States, and a definitional trap

Two US numbers circulate and they are not interchangeable:

• SIA measures the US staffing market at $184 billion in 2024, the largest in the world. Its March 2026 forecast update puts 2026 at $180.2 billion, up 1%, with a further 2% in 2027.
• The American Staffing Association reports $113.5 billion in 2025 staffing sales, down 8.5%. This is a smaller number because it covers temporary and contract staffing sales from its survey base, not the whole market.

Quoting the ASA figure as "the US staffing market" understates it by roughly a third. Quoting the SIA figure as "temp staffing" overstates it. A surprising amount of published analysis mixes the two.

3. Leading Recruitment Agencies

Per SIA's Largest Staffing Firms Globally ranking, Randstad was the largest staffing firm in the world for the seventh consecutive year, followed by the Adecco Group and ManpowerGroup. But the gap at the top has essentially closed. Full-year 2025 results:

Read that table again. Adecco and Randstad finished 2025 within a rounding error of each other (€23.08 billion against €23.077 billion), after Randstad spent seven years as the clear global number one. Adecco had already overtaken Randstad as Europe's largest staffing firm in 2024, per SIA's Largest Staffing Firms in Europe 2025. Adecco grew while Randstad shrank, and it gained share with revenue growth roughly 245 basis points ahead of its key competitors.

ManpowerGroup is the cautionary tale. It posted a net loss of $13.3 million for 2025 against net earnings of $145.1 million in 2024, driven by goodwill impairments on its Switzerland and UK businesses plus restructuring, business disposals, pension settlements and Argentine hyperinflation effects. Writing down goodwill in two established European markets is a company conceding that those businesses will not earn what it paid for them.

The pattern across all three: revenue is flat to down, and margins are being defended by cost cuts rather than growth. Randstad took €181 million of cost out in 2025 alone. Adecco's operating income rose 8% on revenue up 1.3%. This is an industry managing decline competently, not an industry compounding at 13%.

4. Geographical Distribution

Staffing revenue is extraordinarily concentrated. In 2024:

• United States: $184 billion, the largest market by a wide margin.
• Japan: $67.9 billion.
• United Kingdom: $50.8 billion.

Those three markets alone produce just under 49% of global staffing revenue, and the ten largest markets combine for 79%. Any "global" agency strategy is, in practice, a bet on a small number of countries.

Europe totalled €219.6 billion in 2024, down 3%, proving slightly more resilient than the global market's 5% decline. Within Europe the picture is uneven: SIA expects Germany to stay flat in 2026 at around $34.12 billion, while Spain is forecast to grow 4% to $9.32 billion, one of the standout markets.

The regional divergence has been consistent through the downturn: weakness in the US and Northern Europe, resilience or growth in parts of Asia and Southern Europe.

5. Employment in the Recruitment Sector

Globally, per the WEC Industry Impact Report 2026, agencies placed 61 million people in 2024 (58.4 million via temporary agency work, 2.5 million via direct recruitment), around one million more than 2023 despite the 4.2% revenue decline. The agency work penetration rate has been stable at roughly 1.8% of the working-age population.

In the United States, the ASA data shows the squeeze clearly:

• Staffing companies employed an average of 2 million temporary and contract workers per week in Q4 2025, up 65,000 on Q3 but still down 6.1% year on year. In 2024 the weekly average was nearly 2.2 million.
• Across the full year, 9.5 million people worked a temporary or contract assignment in 2025, down 8.5% from 11.2 million in 2024 and well below the 12.7 million in 2023.
• Q4 2025 sales of $29.9 billion were up 2.6% on Q3 while still down 6.2% year on year, the clearest sign of stabilisation in the data.
• 73% of staffing employees work full time (against 75% of the overall workforce), and 40% work in higher-skilled occupations.

One underrated number: industry turnover fell to 376% in 2025, from 416% in 2024. Turnover that high is normal for temp work, where assignments are short by design, but a falling rate in a falling market tells you workers are holding onto assignments rather than churning between them. That is a labour market where workers have lost leverage.

6. Most Recruited Roles

The occupational mix of US temporary and contract staffing is remarkably stable, and it is not what the industry's own marketing implies. Per the ASA:

• Industrial: 36%
• Office, clerical and administrative: 24%
• Professional and managerial: 21%
• Engineering, IT and scientific: 11%
• Health care: 8%

Industrial and office/clerical are 60% of the market between them. Engineering, IT and scientific work, which absorbs a wildly disproportionate share of the industry's technology spend, conference agendas and thought leadership, is 11%. Health care, the segment with the loudest growth narrative, is 8%.

This matters for anyone sizing an agency opportunity: the roles most discussed at industry events are not the roles paying the industry's bills. The volume is in light industrial, logistics, warehousing, skilled trades and administrative work. Faster-growing occupations do exist (data and cybersecurity roles are projected to grow several times faster than the employment average), but they are growing from a small base within staffing.

7. Technological Advancements in Recruitment

The most useful current dataset on agency technology is Bullhorn's GRID 2026 Industry Trends Report, its sixteenth annual, based on responses from nearly 2,300 recruitment professionals across North America, the UK, Ireland, Benelux, DACH and APAC, surveyed in November and December 2025.

Its headline findings:

• 56% of firms reported revenue growth in 2025, up from 40% the year before. 13% grew revenue more than 25%.
• Firms using AI at any stage of the recruitment cycle were 3.5x to 4.5x more likely to have grown revenue. A year earlier the same survey put that gap at only 25% to 40% more likely. The gap is widening fast.
• 78% of firms that grew revenue more than 25% use AI tools inside their ATS.
• Only 10% have agentic AI embedded across the full workflow. 30% have moved to some level of agentic tooling, and 29% are still experimenting with basic generative AI (down from 52% a year earlier).
• 56% of the top performers place candidates in under 10 days, and 22% average three days or less.
• The stated barriers are data readiness, security concerns and unclear implementation strategy, not cost.

Read that 3.5x to 4.5x figure carefully. It is a vendor survey: Bullhorn sells an AI-enabled ATS, and the finding is that firms using an AI-enabled ATS grow faster. It is also self-reported and correlational. Well-run, well-capitalised agencies adopt new tooling earlier and grow faster for reasons that have nothing to do with the tooling. The honest reading is not "buy AI and grow 4x". It is that AI adoption is now a reliable marker of the firms that are winning, and that the marker has strengthened sharply in twelve months, which is a genuine signal even after discounting the source.

The practical layer where this lands is the ATS and CRM. Bullhorn itself is the incumbent for mid-market and enterprise agencies and is priced accordingly, on annual contracts with implementation cost. For a small agency or a new desk, the entry point into the same category is cheaper: Manatal is one of the more credible low-cost options, with AI candidate recommendations, CV parsing and a recruitment-agency CRM built in.

The other structural point in the Bullhorn data is that the barriers are data readiness and implementation, not licence cost. An agency with a decade of badly maintained candidate records will not get 4x anything by buying a tool. The firms pulling ahead cleaned their data first.

8. Future Outlook and Trends

The forecast is for stabilisation, not recovery.

• United States: SIA's March 2026 update forecasts $180.2 billion in 2026, up 1%, and a further 2% in 2027. Cumulative growth of about 10% is expected between 2025 and 2030, which is roughly 2% a year.
• Europe: most markets are expected to return to low but stable growth in 2026. Germany flat at around $34.12 billion, Spain up 4% to $9.32 billion.
• Sentiment: Bullhorn found 45% of firms expect the economy to improve in 2026, down from 73% the year before, with 40% expecting no change. Optimism has collapsed even as results improved, which is what a market that has been wrong-footed three years running looks like.

SIA has also quantified the macro sensitivity, and it is brutal: a 0.5 percentage point downgrade to global GDP growth equates to roughly $9 billion of lost global staffing revenue, and every additional 1% reduction in global GDP growth costs the staffing industry about 3% of annual growth. Staffing is a leveraged bet on GDP. That is why the 13.1% CAGR projections were never plausible: they implied the industry decoupling from the economy it staffs.

The trends that actually matter for agency operators:

1. Volume without price. More placements, less revenue per placement. Mix is shifting toward lower-margin work, and clients have negotiating power.
2. The AI adoption gap is becoming the competitive divide. It widened from a 25% to 40% edge to a 3.5x to 4.5x edge in one year, on the same survey methodology.
3. Perm is the weak spot, temp and contract are the ballast. Direct recruitment placed 2.5 million people against temporary agency work's 58.4 million.
4. Consolidation at the top has stalled the leader. Adecco caught Randstad by growing 1.3% while Randstad fell 4%. Modest growth is enough to change the league table in a flat market.
5. The top-heavy market is still fragmented. 230,000 firms, and the top 100 hold only 41% of revenue. There is no winner-take-all dynamic here.

9. Conclusion

The recruitment agency market is a $620 billion global industry that has declined for three consecutive years, not the 13% compounding growth story that dominates search results. Revenue at the 100 largest firms fell from $285.3 billion in 2022 to $257 billion in 2024. The world's two largest agencies finished 2025 at effectively identical revenue, and the third posted a net loss.

Underneath the decline, the industry is still placing more people than ever: 61 million in 2024, up about a million on the year, at lower prices. Volume is not the problem. Pricing and mix are.

Two things separate the firms growing from the firms shrinking. The first is cost discipline, which is what the listed players' 2025 results are made of. The second is the technology gap, which widened from a modest edge to a multiple in a single year, and which is concentrated in the workflow rather than the tool: only one agency in ten has AI running across its full process, and the barrier is data quality, not licence cost.

For anyone modelling this market, the practical advice is narrower than usual: ignore the syndicated CAGRs, and use SIA, WEC, ASA and the audited accounts of Randstad, Adecco and ManpowerGroup. Those four sources disagree with the popular figures, and they are the ones that turned out to be right.