Staffing and Talent Agencies
Staffing and talent agencies sell access to labor without the employer taking on the hire. They carry the payroll, the compliance, and the risk of a bad fit, and they charge a markup or a placement fee for it. The categories below split by who is being placed and how the work is priced, from hourly light industrial crews to retained executive search.
All 10 categories
Ordered by estimated sizeTemp / Contract Staffing
Hourly workers on the agency's payroll, billed at a markup.
Recruiting Agencies (General)
Permanent-hire search, paid only when someone starts.
Tech Recruiting
Software, data, and IT hiring, permanent and contract.
Executive Search
Retained search for executives and board seats.
Healthcare Staffing
Nurses, allied health, and physicians on assignment.
Offshore Staffing
Dedicated overseas employees, managed and compliant.
Virtual Assistant Agencies
Remote administrative support, often offshore.
Payroll Services
Payroll runs, tax filings, and compliance, done for you.
Legal Staffing & Recruiting
Attorneys and paralegals, contract and permanent.
HR Outsourcing / PEO
Co-employment bundling payroll, benefits, and HR.
Comparisons touching this group
The Margin Map: net margins across 12 agency types, compared
Every agency sits in the middle and takes a cut. The size of the cut that survives as profit varies by a factor of ten. Here is the map.
Staffing agency vs. freight brokerage: two middleman models, opposite economics
One rents out people, one matches loads to trucks. Both live in the middle. Almost nothing else about their businesses works the same way.