No More Cold Calls (than it took last week)

We all know that the top public staffing firms have seen revenue drop 30% year over year. And, private staffers aren’t having a much better go of things. Then, Barry brought us all down last week with the announcement that his London Cabbie Index is at an all time low. So, enough bad news. Here’s the good news: we’re starting to see a bottom.

The engineers in the Bullhorn Nerdery have been building something called the Bullhorn Index. It’s our way of measuring the health of the staffing industry. We base it upon the data we gather in our systems: new job orders, interview activity, placements, contract starts, etc. Of course, our clients opt-in to participate in this project. The engineers tell us that while the last 6 months have been in precipitous decline (thanks for the insight, guys), there is a bottom starting to form. March and April have not been any worse than previous months. In April, the Bullhorn client base generated 43,000 new job orders. So, you can’t say that no one is hiring. Employers are hiring. You just have to hear “no” a lot more before you get to “yes” right now. I can hear the rebuttals forming: “Bullhorn’s client base has a ton of big staffing firms,” or, “Bullhorn’s client base has a ton of smaller firms.” Both are correct, we have a ton of small, medium and large firms. The data tells the same story across all sizes of firm and discipline.

So, if you’ve felt down in the dumps the last 6 months, it’s time to dust yourself off, look in the mirror and ask yourself if you have enough gas in the tank to make it another 6-12 months in this environment. If you do, take heart – at least it’s not getting any worse… for now…