Supply is abundant. Demand is invisible.
Thousands of agencies compete over the same published briefs. The scarce asset is knowing which company decided to hire this week.
TL;DR
- Placement and staffing agencies number in the thousands in every mature market, and most of them compete over the same briefs that reached a job board.
- What agencies lack is not candidates. It is knowing which company has decided to hire before it says so — and public registry events are the earliest trace of that decision.
In every mature market, placement and staffing agencies number in the thousands. Thousands of businesses whose entire product is finding people, and most of them spend the week competing over the same handful of briefs that made it onto a job board.
Ask an agency owner what they are short of and the answer is almost never “more candidates.” Most of them have a bench. What they do not have is a way of knowing which company, this week, has decided to hire and has not told anyone yet. That information is not sold anywhere. It surfaces instead as a scatter of small public events: a company forms, capital is raised, a business changes owner. Each of those is a hiring decision in its earliest and least contested form.
This is why job boards commoditised the industry rather than rescuing it. A published role is a role that five agencies have already seen. By the time a brief is legible it has become a price competition, and whoever wins it usually wins on fee rather than on fit. The agencies that still earn proper margins are the ones reached before anything was published at all.
So I read the filings instead of the board. In the thirty days to 29 September, 5,543 companies filed notice of a private capital raise with the SEC. 830 reported a change in leadership. 102 filed for a merger or a tender offer. As I read them, each of those filings is a hiring decision that has not reached a job board yet.
The introduction is the leverage because it arrives before the competition exists.
— Hayner Ben Ousseni routes capital, talent, and dealflow between operators who need to find each other.