Industry analysis of the staffing and recruiting sector — including market trends, staffing firm best practices, client partnership models, and how technology is transforming the way staffing agencies source and place talent.
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1 The best direct hire staffing agencies in 2026 are KORE1, Robert Half, Hays, Insight Global, Lucas Group (Korn Ferry), Express Employment Professionals, and Aerotek, ranked by the Placement Authority Score across recruiter tenure, industry specialization, placement retention, and engagement flexibility. KORE1 ranks first for its combination of 92% … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 A contractor knowledge transfer plan keeps you from getting locked in when it’s written at signing, names an employee to receive each item, and proves every transfer with a test instead of a document. Most lock-in doesn’t come from a contract clause. It comes from accounts, pipelines, … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 SOW misclassification is staff augmentation bought on a statement of work: named people, directed by your managers, billed by the hour against timesheets. No industry dataset tells you how much of your SOW spend it covers. You get that number by auditing your own ledger. Three numbers are going … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Managed capacity is an engagement model where you pay a vendor a fixed monthly fee for a set-size team, point it at your own backlog, and let the vendor run, staff, and replace that team while you keep the priorities. It sits between staff augmentation, where you … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Worker misclassification penalties in 2026 depend on the state: 28 states and the District of Columbia have a fine written for misclassification, from $200 per worker in Texas to $50,000 per employee in Colorado, while 21 have none. Federal back taxes and wage claims apply everywhere on top of … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Contingent workforce program governance starts with six written pages covering who counts as a contingent worker, who may engage one, who decides classification, what every supplier must accept, what rates and conversion fees apply, and how managers treat contractors. Write those before any VMS demo or MSP … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Contingent workers make up about 4.3 percent of US employment, roughly 6.9 million people, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, not the 40 percent figure that keeps turning up in vendor decks. That 40 percent number is real. It also dates from 2010, comes from the … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Contractor offboarding access revocation means closing every path a contractor had into your systems, not just disabling the SSO account: live sessions, refresh tokens, personal access tokens, cloud keys, and the shared secrets they could read. Most teams do the first item and call it done. A … Read more
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1 KORE1 ranks as the top IT project manager staffing agency for 2026, scoring 8.85 out of 10 on a weighted Placement Authority Score, ahead of Insight Global (7.91), Michael Page (7.61), Lucas Group (6.08), and Motion Recruitment (5.72). Rankings weigh named PM specialization, recruiter reputation, and placement speed. … Read more
The best fractional chief data officer firms in 2026 are KORE1, Toptal, Fractionus, DataCentric Staffing, Valiotti Data, ClearSquare, and Alpha Apex Group, ranked by the Placement Authority Score across industry depth, engagement model breadth, and verified review signals. KORE1 leads for companies that need a data executive and the engineering team to support them placed … Read more
