Waiting for the staffing market to “bounce back” has quietly become a strategy.

It might also be the wrong one. What if 2022 was the peak — and we don’t get back to it?

That’s the question at the center of the next episode of The Staffing Playbook, and I brought on the one person with the data to actually answer it: Eric Gregg, co-founder and CX strategist at ClearlyRated.

Eric has spent two decades — and millions of surveys — studying how staffing buyers and candidates actually behave. His newest research says the ground has shifted under all of us, on both sides of the table.

On the buyer side: most now start with a short list of about three firms already in their heads — and they hire off that list. Miss it, and you didn’t lose the deal. You never knew it existed.

On the candidate side: they can write the resume, parse the job description, and prep for the interview with AI before a recruiter ever crosses their mind. Staffing has gone from the first call to one of the last.

So the real question isn’t “when does it come back?” It’s this: how do you grow when the tide isn’t lifting anyone — and what is the human recruiter actually still for?

We get into:
→ Why specialization matters more than it ever has — and what it has to look like now
→ Where the human still wins once a machine can do the transactional work
→ The one finding in Eric’s data that stopped me cold — it looks like it kills the “humans are irreplaceable” argument, until you look closer
→ How you earn a spot on that three-firm short list

Real data. No hype. Same as always.