# US employment placement agency staffing peaked at 280,200 in September 2022 and was 245,000 in July 2026, a fall of 12.6%

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20260701-hr-recruiter-4
Date: 2026-07-01 · Stage: Labour impact
Can this record move a task judgement? yes
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/hr-recruiter

## Scope

United States payroll employment at firms whose business is placing people in jobs — agencies and search firms, not the in-house recruiters who are most of this occupation. That makes it a partial view with one advantage: an agency's headcount tracks how much sourcing and screening is being bought as a service, which is the part of the work under the most pressure from tooling. The confound is large and cannot be separated here: this industry moves with the hiring market, and 2023 to 2025 was a sustained slowdown in hiring, so a recruiter shortage and a recruiter surplus both show up in this line. The peak is September 2022, two months before ChatGPT. Seasonally adjusted, monthly, in thousands; recent months preliminary.

## Source

- US Bureau of Labor Statistics — Current Employment Statistics, all employees, employment placement agencies (NAICS 561311), series CES6056131101 — https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES6056131101 (primary source)

## What this means

The part of recruiting that companies buy from outside has shrunk by an eighth from its peak. If sourcing and screening were being automated anywhere first, the agencies selling it as a service are where it would show up in a public number — and a public number has moved.

## What it does not show yet

It does not separate a tool from a hiring freeze, and those two years had both. It also does not cover the in-house recruiter, who is most of this occupation and whose employer may have brought the work back in precisely because a tool made it cheaper to do internally — which would show as a fall here and no fall at all in the number of recruiters.

## How to verify it yourself

Ask a recruiter you know whether their company still uses an agency for the roles it used to, and what changed. The answer 'we do it ourselves now' and the answer 'we need fewer of these roles' land in the same place on this chart and are different futures for you.


More: https://flyvolo.ai/llms.txt