Few people in the industry would be surprised to hear that temporary staffing spend through Vendor Management Systems (VMS) has been increasing for some time. Surely, though, the VMS juggernaut didn’t make it through 2009 completely unscathed, right? After all, this was a year in which the temporary staffing market declined by 25%. It’s not easy to take a larger piece from a pie that shrinks by 25%. The share of temporary staffing spend going through a VMS would have needed to shoot up quite a bit for VMS to grow at all that year.

Well, we have crunched the numbers from the latest VMS/MSP Competitive Landscape Report every which way and we are now estimating that U.S. temporary staffing spend through VMS increased by 15%, from $23.0 billion in 2008 to $26.5 billion in 2009. (Spend through a Managed Service Provider was flat. We are not including VMS spend through other arrangements such as independent contractor/payrolling, statement of work, or outsourcing.)

As a proportion of total temporary spend, the share of temporary staffing passing through VMS did indeed surge, from 25% in 2008 to 37% in 2009 by our estimates. Further detail on our estimates of VMS and MSP spend is available to corporate members in our report: Estimate of U.S. VMS and MSP markets.

If VMS spend grew by double-digits in 2009, just how fast could it be growing now that the staffing industry is recovering?