Twice yearly, SIA updates its US Staffing Industry Forecast, including an update to the outlook for IT staffing. As part of this process, which is underway now, SIA speaks with as many industry participants as possible to gain a “boots on the ground” understanding of what is happening in the market. Additionally, SIA conducts a review of macroeconomic and industry-specific data and indicators ranging from GDP forecasts to job postings, IT spending and other related data.

One final — and key — source of information for marking sizing and forecasting is the end-of-year results and conference calls that public staffing companies have released throughout February. Tuning in to these calls provides a useful first look at how market conditions in IT staffing are shaping up.

The good news is that companies that either focus on IT or have IT operations are, across the board, reporting positive leading indicators. The problem? Those indicators have yet to translate to revenue growth.

Keith Waddell, president and CEO of Robert Half, in the company’s Q4 2024 conference call on Jan. 29:

“It is true that tech has performed better lately, principally in the data area, be it analytics, be it governance, be it hygiene and then an ERP platform modernization, be it SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft. … All of those have been positive both on the talent solutions side and on the Protiviti side and sometimes working together.

“Our people on the ground, talking to their clients every day, things have changed. There’s more activity, clients are more willing to talk to them. It just hasn’t yet converted to starts and placements. We expect that it will.”

Jonas Prising, CEO and chairman of the board at ManpowerGroup, in the company’s Q4 2024 conference call on Jan. 30:

“The tone has changed, and the level of optimism or hope is palpable, but it has yet to translate into anything meaningful in terms of change in employer behavior. So it’s all about employer confidence, and we are hopeful that given the overall sentiment, this increased employer confidence translates to an increase in demand over time, but it’s really too early to see any effect of that yet.

“From an Experis perspective, we’re really not seeing any change in terms of demand. It is stable at lower levels. We can still see a challenging demand environment as it relates to enterprise clients, although our convenience clients are faring a little bit better. They’re holding up better. It’s still a low demand environment for both Manpower and Experis. But we’re seeing some degree of, shall we say, optimism looking ahead as it relates to the US.”

Joe Liberatore, CEO of Kforce, in the company’s Q4 2024 conference call on Feb. 3:

“Conversations with our clients post-election and the preponderance of economic views suggest to us that the operating environment as we move into 2025 may improve as we get further into the year. With that said, we have not yet seen signs of a positive inflection point in our key performance indicators. Rather, we have continued to experience stability in our business, other than normal seasonality at the end of the year.

“We believe that clients, broadly speaking, have been exercising caution and delaying the initiation of technology projects partly in anticipation of a recession that hasn’t materialized, which has resulted in an increasingly strong backlog of strategically imperative technology investments. We believe that clients will begin to incrementally invest in technology initiatives as they gain additional confidence in the US economy.”

In a follow up, he continued, “Client visits are significantly up here in the beginning of the year. … That’s also translated into our job orders being up. But we haven’t seen any of that manifest itself in outcomes at this point.”

Ted Hanson, CEO of ASGN, in the company’s Q4 2024 conference call on Feb. 5:

“Despite IT budgets remaining constrained, our pipeline of work has continued to expand. … As we transition into 2025, we are beginning to see an improvement in business confidence, although we believe a turnaround in IT spending has yet to materialize.”

In response to an analyst’s question about whether the company is starting to see any encouraging signs, Rand Blazer, then president of ASGN, stated, “We look at a number of markets…our activity levels and the flow of business, which maybe has not yet translated into revenue, but we can see the precursors for that. That gives us confidence.” Blazer became executive vice chairman of ASGN effective March 1.

Jorge Vazquez, CFO of Randstad, in the company’s Q4 2024 conference call on Feb. 12:

“We see some increasing US business confidence, and while this has yet to materialize in an uptick in activity, confidence is the key to unlocking higher hiring activity.”

Denis Machuel, CEO of Adecco, on the company’s Q4 204 conference call on Feb. 26:

“We see that temp volumes have been trending positively in … the US. What’s interesting, while the temp business is softly growing, the perm business is very soft, -8%. That says something, probably, around companies being a bit more positive. When you see some little bit of improvement and you bring in 10 people, you don’t dare yet to recruit permanently. So that’s where we’ve got to be cautious about what we say.

“We believe that there is a bit of momentum. We remain cautious, but this momentum is encouraging. We’ve seen job order volumes increasing in Akkodis US. .. .We’re not calling it a recovery, but we see a little bit of a positive trend.”

Hear for yourself at SIA’s Executive Forum North America 2025 conference in Miami Beach, Florida. There is still time to register. Be among the first to see SIA’s biannual update to the US Staffing Industry Forecast, participate in facilitated networking roundtables and network with staffing executives from across the industry, all while gaining insight from industry leaders.

Our biannual update to the US Staffing Industry Forecast will publish on March 11, in conjunction with the conference.