Welcome to this week’s StaffingHub Brief, your strategic intelligence roundup for staffing agency leaders. In this week’s issue:
- US staffing hours rose 11% year over year the week of July 4, with industrial hours up 19%, even as Hays reported permanent hiring down 7% like-for-like in its most recent quarter.
- Enterprises with a formal, board-governed AI strategy are three times more likely to report measurable impact than those without one, 60% versus 20%.
- 71% of workers say they’ve worked with someone who wasn’t who they claimed to be professionally, and the Department of Labor just intensified nationwide enforcement on H-1B and PERM visa fraud.
US staffing hours are climbing. European permanent hiring is not.
US staffing hours rose 11% year over year in the week ended July 4, according to the SIA | Bullhorn Staffing Indicator. Commercial hours were up 15%, professional hours rose 6%, and industrial hours, likely fueled by manufacturing, logistics, and data center demand, climbed 19%. (Learn more) ManpowerGroup’s second quarter results back up the trend: revenue rose 5.8% year over year to $4.86 billion in constant currency, beating the company’s own forecast, with its core Manpower staffing division up 8% organically. (Learn more)
Hays tells a different story. The UK’s second-largest staffing firm reported Q4 net fees down 5% like-for-like, driven by permanent placements falling 7% and temp and contracting down 3%. The firm is offsetting the decline with cost discipline: consultant net fee productivity has now grown for 11 straight quarters, and it has delivered roughly £115 million in structural savings since 2024. (Learn more)
Why it matters: US industrial and commercial demand is genuinely strengthening while global permanent hiring stays soft, so where your book sits matters more than the headline growth number this quarter.
Formal AI strategy triples your odds of proving it works
Enterprises with a dedicated, board-governed AI strategy are three times more likely to report measurable impact than those without one, 60% versus 20%, according to Info-Tech Research Group’s survey of 551 senior leaders. Organizations with board-level governance were also twice as likely to feel confident about future budget increases, 73% versus 34% for those running AI ad hoc or department by department. (Learn more)
JLL’s Future of Work survey found similar optimism, with a gap underneath it. Sixty percent of more than 2,200 C-suite and real estate leaders across 21 countries expect their workforces to grow, not shrink, and most expect AI to reinvent roles rather than replace them. But only 31% are actively redesigning work for human-AI collaboration, and just 15% describe themselves as having reached the optimizing stage. (Learn more)
Why it matters: Clients who formalized their AI approach can already point to proof it works, and the rest are still betting on growth they haven’t done the redesign work to earn.
The labor shortage nobody is pricing in
Labor market firm Lightcast projects the largest worker shortage in US history, roughly 6 million by 2032, while Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce separately projects a 5.25 million shortfall from retirements and job growth over the same period. SHRM research found that 32.7% of US job openings can’t be filled by candidates whose last job was in the same occupational group, and the deepest gaps are landing in nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, construction workers, and airplane mechanics, roles that need a physical presence and a credential no AI tool replaces soon. (Learn more)
CEOs, meanwhile, are hedging. Chief Executive’s CEO Confidence Index, fielded July 7 to 9 among 321 US CEOs, found current business conditions at 5.8 out of 10, the highest reading of the year. But the year-ahead outlook softened to 5.9 from 6.1 in June, and the share of CEOs planning headcount reductions climbed to 22% from 17%, even as 73% expect higher revenue in 2026. (Learn more)
Why it matters: Clients expect more revenue but are pulling back on permanent headcount right as the structural worker shortage gets worse, and that distance between confidence and hiring caution is where a flexible staffing pitch hits hardest.
Trust is becoming the product
More than 70% of US workers say they’ve worked with someone who turned out not to be what they claimed professionally, and 81% have worked for an organization that hired someone who couldn’t perform the job, according to GCheck’s survey of 1,500 US workers. Only 14% of employees believe employers are doing enough to verify who they’re hiring and who’s actually doing the work. (Learn more)
Federal enforcement is catching up to the same problem from a different angle. The Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General announced an intensified, nationwide enforcement push targeting H-1B visa fraud, PERM-related fraud, and labor trafficking, including falsified visa applications, wage kickbacks, and benching of foreign workers. The agency is also soliciting tips from the public. (Learn more)
Why it matters: As verification erodes on the candidate side and enforcement tightens on the compliance side, an agency that can prove who it placed and how is selling something buyers can no longer assume.
AI bias liability and a tax credit stuck in Congress
A Stanford HAI study of 4 million job applications across more than 150 employers using the same third-party AI screening platform found that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied to positions where the tool produced outcomes meeting the EEOC’s four-fifths threshold for adverse impact. Because so many employers rely on the same handful of AI vendors, researchers found a rejection pattern they call algorithmic monoculture, where a candidate turned down by one employer’s tool is significantly more likely to be turned down by another’s. Courts have already begun testing employer liability for these outcomes, regardless of who built the algorithm. (Learn more)
The Work Opportunity Tax Credit expired on January 1, and Congress hasn’t renewed it. The credit was worth $2,400 to $9,600 per qualifying placement of veterans, the long-term unemployed, and other workers who face barriers to hiring, exactly the placements many staffing desks specialize in. A bipartisan renewal bill would raise the credit to 50% of wages and index it to inflation, but until it passes, firms should keep screening and filing Form 8850 to preserve eligibility for a likely retroactive reinstatement. (Learn more)
Why it matters: One exposure you inherit from your AI vendor and one credit you lost on January 1 both call for cleaning up your paperwork now, before a court or Congress forces the issue.
The StaffingHub Brief provides weekly insights for staffing agency leaders and publishes every Friday.
