Staffing leaders are entering 2025 with a renewed sense of optimism. After navigating three years of high inflation, rising interest rates, and overall economic uncertainty, many staffing businesses are preparing for a promising year ahead. While challenges remain, leaders are confident their teams are ready to overcome these hurdles by leveraging innovative strategies and taking advantage of new opportunities.
The Sense team surveyed more than 250 staffing executives, agency owners, managers, and front-line recruiters for our “2025 State of Staffing Report.” Based on our findings, this year will be defined by strategic business growth, evolving candidate expectations, and the increasing role of AI technology across the recruiting process.
We’ll publish the complete report in January 2025. In the meantime, here are the top trends that are set to shape the outlook for the staffing industry over the next 12 months.
Unsurprisingly, 2024 was a difficult year for the staffing industry. Nearly every one of our survey respondents (95%) reported that the sluggish economy impacted their business to some extent.
However, it appears that staffing leaders now feel the hard times are behind us. Encouragingly, 97% of staffing firms anticipate growth in 2025. While most firms are projecting modest increases—somewhere in the 5-20% range—the sentiment among staffing professionals has notably improved. Only 3% of firms anticipate no growth, a significant drop compared to previous years. And 9% of firms are setting aggressive growth targets upwards of 40%.
The overall takeaway is that the staffing industry has a positive yet tempered outlook moving forward. With inflation stabilizing and an interest rate cut cycle already beginning, the need for staffing services will likely start to increase. Staffing leaders are already positioning their firms to drive sustained growth in the year ahead.
With optimism high, business growth is the top priority for staffing firms, with more than two-thirds of our survey respondents identifying client acquisition as their primary goal. For context, attracting qualified candidates came out as the second most important goal but it was cited by only 17% of survey respondents.
However, attracting new clients is also seen as the industry’s toughest challenge, with 65% of respondents highlighting it as their biggest obstacle.
Winning new business will require sales and marketing teams within staffing firms to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. These teams must offer exceptional service, clearly articulate value, craft personalized strategies to meet client needs, and leverage technology to engage potential clients at scale. The firms that prepare to tackle these challenges will be in a prime position to capitalize on growth opportunities in 2025.
Moving into 2025, competition is set to intensify within the staffing industry. More than a quarter of survey respondents named it as their top sales challenge. Additionally, 21% highlighted simply generating sales leads as a major difficulty.
The key takeaway is that hiring organizations have multiple options in who they work with and they’re exercising greater scrutiny when evaluating staffing partners. Again, clear value differentiation will be critical to attracting potential clients and winning new business. To stand out, firms will need to showcase their expertise and ability to deliver results at each stage in the sales journey.
Want actionable strategies for attracting staffing clients? These resources can help:
Candidate expectations continue to evolve, with 66% of survey respondents reporting that candidates now demand more from recruiters. We explored this trend in more detail and found that the top priorities for candidates include frequent communication and updates, faster recruiting processes, transparent job descriptions, and personalized experiences. Additionally, 57% of respondents said candidate drop-off rates are increasing, underscoring the importance of delivering best-in-class talent experiences.
Simply put, candidates want a seamless and engaging recruiting journey—and they're increasingly devoting their energy to the organizations that deliver it (while “ghosting” the ones who don’t). As we enter 2025, it’s critical that recruiting teams move quickly, communicate frequently, and provide a tailored experience to every candidate under consideration.
Apart from keeping candidates engaged, our survey also found that attracting the right talent in the first place is a challenge. Sourcing is the most time-consuming stage of the recruiting process, as cited by 58% of our survey respondents. We also learned that more than half of respondents consider the number of qualified candidates to be their most important recruiting metric.
Even more, recruiting teams are spending significant time on sourcing and screening candidates. Regarding sourcing specifically, the majority of individual recruiters devote 11-30 hours to the task each week. When it comes to screening, individual recruiters are spending as much as 20 hours per week assessing candidates. This means that the combined hours spent on sourcing and screening alone account for the majority of the typical recruiter’s workweek—leaving little to no time for anything else.
The rise of AI has been the biggest technological advancement in decades. And the staffing industry is embracing it, with 78% of firms using AI in some capacity, according to our survey.
Staffing professionals are leveraging this technology to overcome their biggest challenges, from sourcing and screening to candidate engagement. Among the most common applications are generating recruiting content (e.g., job descriptions, pre-screening questions, and candidate messages), automating communication, and matching candidates to relevant roles.
In particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Conversational AI are changing how recruiting teams go about engaging candidates. Over the past few years, many staffing firms have turned to AI recruiting chatbots to answer candidates' questions, match them to open roles, collect application details, pre-screen them against role requirements, and schedule interviews.
Entering 2025, recruiting AI is continuing to advance with the emergence of Conversational Voice AI and autonomous recruiting agents.
Conversational Voice AI enables staffing firms to completely automate phone conversations. This advancement in recruiting AI saves countless hours on sourcing, screening, interview scheduling, and reference check phone calls.
Conversational Voice AI is designed to mirror human interactions so candidates still have a natural and engaging phone conversation, even though the experience is automated. Unlike traditional chatbots, Voice AI uses advanced voice recognition to have meaningful conversations with candidates, ask relevant questions, and make real-time decisions based on responses.
The impact of Voice AI extends beyond hours saved and recruiting efficiency. It enables staffing firms to scale their operations without sacrificing candidate experience. Even as the recruiting process becomes faster and reaches a wider talent pool, Conversational Voice AI ensures each individual candidate feels valued and supported.
The introduction of autonomous recruiting agents marks another major leap in AI and recruiting automation. Known as Recruiter AI at Sense, this product brings a multi-agent ecosystem of autonomous AI entities to staffing firms that each specialize in a specific recruiting task. These "agents" collaborate seamlessly to automate the end-to-end recruiting process, mimicking the roles of traditional human recruiters to deliver a highly efficient and scalable recruiting process.
Here’s an overview of how Recruiter AI could be used in a typical staffing firm:
Each agent in this ecosystem uses intelligent AI to determine if candidates should advance, then routes them to the next stage of the recruiting process (and the automated agent responsible for that stage). This multi-agent approach significantly reduces administrative burdens, allowing human recruiters to focus on high-value activities like building relationships and making strategic decisions.
2025 is set to be a year of opportunity and innovation for the staffing industry. While challenges like intense competition, rising candidate expectations, and sourcing/screening difficulties persist, firms are embracing AI technology to provide better talent experiences and expand their client rosters.
You can learn more about the staffing industry outlook when we release the Sense “2025 State of Staffing Report” in January. If you’re interested in connecting in the meantime to see Conversational Voice AI or Recruiter AI in action, you can schedule some time here.
