Staffing companies are increasingly implementing automation in selected processes.
After remaining roughly stable in the 24% to 28% range for five years, the average percentage of staffing firms automating staffing buyer functions rose in 2022 and 2023 to 30% and 29%, respectively. This information comes from SIA’s recent report, North America Staffing Company Survey 2023: Use of automation: staffing/talent platforms, artificial intelligence and process automation in traditional staffing.
“Most staffing firms have been automating elements of their business processes on both the temporary and permanent worker side and on the buyer client side,” Jon Osborne, SIA’s VP of strategic research and author of the report, wrote in the summary. “The average share of processes automated on the worker side was 53% in 2023 and 29% on the buyer side; the general trend in average share automated is trending up very gradually.”
However, staffing firms have become selective in the purposes for which they use automation. The firms have notably shown heightened interest in direct communication with temporary workers via messaging systems, with an increase of 10 percentage points in the past five years. Following this surge is the interest in automatically assigning temporary workers to shifts or assignments, which increased by six percentage points.
Conversely, staffing firms have shown declining interest in automating the creation of descriptions for available positions/requesting staff, which declined by 10 percentage points over the period. Other functions, such as video interviewing temporary workers and searching for temporary worker profiles/résumés, saw increased interest in the past but experienced a decline in percentages by 2023.
