The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES

Twiggy Sellers, an HR director at a national fulfillment company, brings a decade of staffing-agency experience to a candid conversation about accountability. They explore the tricky two-week handoff, co-employment gray areas, onboarding, retention, and what makes associates feel included. Expect practical talk on new-hire vests, peak-season morale, surveys, shared data, and why agencies should rethink cold calls and the word “temp.”

Staffing data gets a major correction, revealing an industry split between sluggish growth and double-digit gains. Data-center construction is driving concentrated demand for skilled trades, especially in Utah, while recruiting difficulty reaches a four-year high. The discussion also explores candidate silence, AI-powered outreach, and practical ways staffing firms can identify their market track and respond.

Shad Tidler, a Lushin sales training and consulting professional, brings the Four S’s of Sales Growth: Strategy, Structure, Staff, and Skills. He explores why staffing firms often struggle with systems and sales hiring, how to turn revenue goals into daily execution, the line between coaching and micromanagement, and a quick way to diagnose the real bottleneck in your sales engine.

Staffing is finally growing, but the recovery faces a new test: the Federal Reserve’s first rate hike in three years. This briefing examines upgraded industry forecasts, flexibility-driven industrial demand, vulnerable manufacturing clients, squeezed margins, and a frozen labor market. It closes with a practical branch-level playbook for repricing, overtime relief, data-center backfill, fuel support, and protecting market share.

Daniel Mastropolo, a staffing executive, entrepreneur, and fractional CTO, explores why staffing firms promote AI while lacking technical leadership. He shares hard lessons from rapid growth, funding agreements, and technology consulting. Topics include vendor hype, platform integrations, data risks, compliance, skilled-trade labor shortages, and why technical independence is becoming essential.

July’s negative payroll headline hides a more nuanced labor market, with temporary staffing returning to year-over-year growth and manufacturing signaling renewed demand. Earnings from TrueBlue, Kelly, and Adecco reveal a margin trap for growing firms. The discussion also explores cautious hiring, AI’s limited measured productivity gains, agentic AI, and six practical actions for staffing operators.

Waiting for the staffing market to "bounce back" has quietly become a strategy. It might also be the wrong one. What if 2022 was the peak — and we don't get back to it? That's the question at the center of the next episode of The Staffing Playbook, and I brought on the one person with the data to actually answer it: Eric Gregg, co-founder and CX strategist at ClearlyRated. Eric has spent two decades — and millions of surveys — studying how staffing buyers and candidates actually behave. His newest research says the ground has shifted under all of us, on both sides of the table. On the buyer side: most now start with a short list of about three firms already in their heads — and they hire off that list. Miss it, and you didn't lose the deal. You never knew it existed. On the candidate side: they can write the resume, parse the job description, and prep for the interview with AI before a recruiter ever crosses their mind. Staffing has gone from the first call to one of the last. So the real question isn't "when does it come back?" It's this: how do you grow when the tide isn't lifting anyone — and what is the human recruiter actually still for? We get into: → Why specialization matters more than it ever has — and what it has to look like now → Where the human still wins once a machine can do the transactional work → The one finding in Eric's data that stopped me cold — it looks like it kills the "humans are irreplaceable" argument, until you look closer → How you earn a spot on that three-firm short list Real data. No hype. Same as always.

Three weeks ago, US staffing hours printed down 2%. Commercial, down 4. The word "stall" started showing up in headlines. The Staffing Playbook Podcast, Powered by YES (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-staffing-playbook-podcast/) Last Tuesday, the same indicator printed up 11%. Industrial — up 19%. Here's the thing: both numbers had a holiday in them. Ep. 80 of The Staffing Playbook is about the most whipsawed month this industry's tape has had all year — and how an operator reads it without getting shaken out: → SIA's brand-new Staffing Confidence Index debuting at a four-year high — three weeks before the hours data agreed with it → Three calendar distortions in three months (a tariff-shocked base, Juneteenth, a Saturday July 4th) — and the one segment signal that survived all of them → Why orders lead and hours lag — and how the firms watching orders never panicked → ManpowerGroup's Q2: back to profit, guidance up, and a 26% one-day repricing of the entire recovery → The AI layoff paradox: AI led cited layoff reasons for the fourth straight month — almost entirely in white-collar tech. The warehouse isn't in the data. → And per ManpowerGroup's own research: 90% of companies now use AI in hiring. Fewer than 5% say it's working. Tuesday's print — the first clean, no-holiday week in over a month — settled it: +8% overall, industrial +14%. That's not a mixed picture. That's a market turning. Ep. 80 drops Thursday, July 23 at 11:30 AM MDT. If you know someone who runs a branch and got whipsawed by that June tape, send it to them.

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.