What got us here will not get us there.

Dear friends,

I am worried that too much of our industry believes what got us here will get us there.

It will not.

The market has changed. Client expectations have changed. The economics have changed. And AI is now changing the rules faster than any wave before it.

This letter is written out of respect for the industry that gave me so much, and for the people still doing the real work. But it is written honestly, because I think the next 18 months matter more than most people in this business realize.

Change is normal here. That is the good news.

If you zoom out, the historical pattern is clear. This industry has never been static. It has always expanded, contracted, rebuilt, and specialized.

You can see it in the labor market itself. U.S. job openings were 4.6 million in January 2008, fell to 2.2 million by July 2009 during the financial crisis, surged to 12.3 million in March 2022, and stood at 7.6 million in May 2026. That does not describe a dead market. It describes a cyclical and selective one, where timing, positioning, and quality matter more than ever.¹

The staffing and recruiting ecosystem tells the same story. U.S. employment-services employment stood at 1.5 million in January 1990, climbed to 3.8 million by January 2000, held at 3.4 million into January 2008, dropped to 2.5 million in April 2020, rebounded to 3.9 million in March 2022, and was roughly 3.2 million in June 2026.²

We have already lived through multiple waves of growth, consolidation, disruption, and reinvention. Compression is normal. Re-expansion is normal. And the firms that survive each wave do not survive by staying generic. They survive by becoming more useful.

The market is splitting. The middle is disappearing.

I believe the split is accelerating.

At one end, the largest firms will keep getting larger, because they can invest in systems, infrastructure, data, and operational leverage that smaller firms cannot match.

At the other end, highly specialized firms will keep mattering, because candidates and clients still want to work with people who genuinely understand their market, their language, their risks, and their ambitions.

What I do not believe in is the future of generic, middle-of-the-road recruiting. The future belongs to scale on one side and specialization on the other. This is not a broadcast market anymore. It is a narrowcast market.

For smaller firms, that is not bad news, if you understand the assignment. You do not need to be huge to be valuable. You need to be specific. You need to know a market deeply enough that candidates trust you, clients rely on you, and your judgment cannot be easily replaced by software.

The real strategic question

Which brings me to the question I think every firm owner should be asking. Not “How good is our team?” Not “What tools are we using?” But this:

Where are we positioned on the supply and demand curve, and does that market reward human judgment or commodity process?

If you are in a high-demand, low-supply market, the candidate has leverage and the recruiter has the opportunity to create real value. Those are the markets you should want to be in. That is where guidance matters, where relationships matter, where insight matters, and where a true recruitment consultant earns their money.

If you are in a high-supply, low-demand market, the economics are different. It is not just a harder market to operate in. It is the kind of market where the process gets automated fastest, because when supply is abundant and differentiation is weak, automation moves in quickly. If that is your market, you must become an AI-first firm, or someone else will.

Where the human value actually lives

I have spent 18 years in this industry. I saw it from the job-board era of the early 2000s, through my time as Global President of Innovation at The Adecco Group, through building my own recruitment firm. And what that journey taught me is what this industry really is at its best.

It is not about filling jobs. It is about helping millions of people get somewhere. Every client I speak with runs a team trying to help somebody move forward. A candidate trying to change their life. A hiring manager trying to build a team. A business making a strategic call in a moment that matters.

I was speaking recently with a client who recruits in a highly specialized corner of healthcare. They are not transactional recruiters. They are consultants and, honestly, friends, people who guide another human being through a series of serious decisions with context, judgment, and trust that carries into the next decision, and the one after that.

That part of the job is real work. It is not a “soft skill.” It is not optional. It is where a large share of the value lives, and where the margin lives.

Anyone who has actually run a desk knows the role was never just “recruiter.” On any given day you are part consultant, part therapist, part connector, part guide, and part friendly voice. You help people make sense of risk, timing, confidence, ambition, and change. The problem is that this service is being repriced while the jobs themselves are evolving.

Where AI actually fits

Here is my position, stated plainly. Soon, every company on earth will have some form of agentic workforce. That includes your clients. And it should include you.

Your clients will expect you to understand this shift. They will expect you to lead through it. And if you do not, some of them will move toward partners who can.

But “agentic workforce” does not mean pretending machines can replace every meaningful conversation. The real opportunity is signal quality, operating leverage, and decision support. My framework for where the line sits has always been R.I.V.:

Relevant, interested, and verified are increasingly machine work. AI can screen for facts faster, match at higher frequency, validate credentials, prioritize pipelines, and clear out the time-consuming redundancies in the middle and back office. If it is hard skills and high-frequency matching, automate it.

But career direction, ambition, timing, and trust still require human interpretation. An AI system the individual does not control cannot truly provide that service. In the future, your personal AI becomes part of how you work. But the deeply human act of guiding another person through a meaningful career decision is different. So is guiding a client through their transformation. Both require context that lives in relationships, not in data.

The market is already telling us this is where things are going. LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting research found that 89% of talent acquisition professionals believe measuring quality of hire will become increasingly important, but only 25% feel highly confident their organization can measure it well today. And 61% believe AI can improve how quality of hire is measured.³

Read those numbers together and the message is clear. The market is not just asking for speed. It is asking for better judgment and better proof. Technology delivers the proof. You deliver the judgment.

Why I am really writing this

I need to be honest with you about something.

When we first released EQ Buddy, it was an R&D project, a research partner created with recruiters.

During that first year, we were learning how the technology worked, what the models could do, where they helped, and where human judgment still mattered most.

Over the last year, we have moved from research into deep partnership with customers. We have worked alongside staffing and recruiting firms to understand the real needs of this industry, the daily work, the systems, the exceptions, the risks, and the outcomes that matter.

Those customers showed us that research was only the beginning. The larger opportunity was the layer underneath human judgment, the admin, the data entry, the compliance chasing, the timesheet reconciliation, and the endless back-office grind. That work should not be consuming your best people. The front office is where humans win. The back office is where they are trapped.

That learning is what led us to EQ.app, a platform of governed digital workers that take on the middle- and back-office workflows of staffing and recruiting firms, so the humans in your business can do the work only humans can do.

We call the mission Zero-Admin, and we mean it literally. We have been running it quietly with enterprise staffing and recruiting firms for months. It is real, it works, and it is ready.

Buddy

Workforce active

Morning, Alex.

Your payroll worker checked this week’s timesheets. Twelve are ready and three need a decision.

Needs you

Three timesheet exceptions

Review

Two shifts exceed the supplied weekly-hours rule

One record is missing client approval

Evidence and recommended actions are attached

Open the evidence

Ask Buddy what your workforce should take on next

Today we are opening it in preview. Not to everyone. We are inviting a limited group of firms who want to be first, who want to shape it with us, and who understand that the next 18 months will separate the firms that modernized from the firms that meant to.

What the winners will do

The winners will do more with less. They will build stronger client relationships. They will move faster. They will specialize more clearly. They will use systems better. They will combine human judgment with technology instead of choosing one against the other.

I know what it feels like when the job gets messy. Too much information. Too many tools. Too many promises. Too much noise pretending to be progress. I have worked contract and permanent recruitment. I have started a business with my own money. I know the conference circuit, the networking dinners, the bars where everyone knows everyone, and the pressure of staying relevant while the ground moves under your feet.

That is why I write to more than 135,000 people every week. Because I believe this industry deserves better shared information, better guidance, and better leadership.

I still believe clients want to work with people. I still believe relationships matter. I still believe trust wins. But relationships alone will not be enough if the service, speed, systems, and insight behind them do not keep pace.

My promise is simple. We will do everything we can to help you adapt, grow, and win, because your success matters to us deeply.

You are not separate from us. You are us.