SIA recently published its annual Merger & Acquisition Trends: North America 2021 Update, which tracks the number of transactions each year, both in aggregate and by staffing segment. In 2020, SIA identified 69 publicly announced staffing transactions in North America. This figure is considerably lower than the 110 deals observed in 2019 and is the fewest number of deals since 2016, highlighting the impact of Covid-19 on M&A activity in 2020.

While both professional and commercial staffing M&A activity cooled down in 2020, the year-over-year effects on transactions involving professional staffing companies (-37%) were less pronounced than commercial staffing deals (-50%) thanks largely to the resilience of the IT staffing segment. Within the professional segment, IT staffing deals saw the smallest year-over-year drop in activity (-4 deals, -19%) despite a significant decrease in transactions involving firms serving other professional segments such as healthcare (-8 deals, -50%), multiple professional (-5 deals, -63%), and other professional segments (-5 deals, -36%). IT staffing deal activity appears to be rebounding in 2021 with eight deals involving IT staffing companies already announced in the first quarter.

SIA also recently published the Merger & Acquisition Trends: Europe 2021 Update and found M&A activity fell sharply in Europe last year as well, recording only 52 publicly announced transactions following 79 deals in 2019. Consistent with North America, activity involving professional staffing firms (-6 deals, -19% year over year) was less impacted than commercial staffing deals (-9 deals, -45%). However, this was largely driven by increased year-over-year activity in the healthcare sector (+2 deals, +29%) rather than the IT sector (-2 deals, -29%. IT deal activity was largely concentrated in the UK with four IT staffing targets based in the UK and one based in the Netherlands.

Both the Merger & Acquisition Trends: North America and the Merger & Acquisition Trends: Europe reports are available for SIA corporate members to download. These reports include analysis and a directory of M&A deals in the staffing and workforce solutions ecosystem completed in 2020. Corporate Members also have access to SIA’s Mergers and Acquisitions Database, an interactive tool containing details collected on more than 1,500 global staffing and workforce solutions transactions dating back to January 2014. The database is updated quarterly and provides drop-down menus that allow the user to select a subset of transactions based on criteria such as geographic region, industry segment, and date range.