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 Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Extend a contractor’s contract when the work continues but conversion is blocked, convert when the work is permanent and you’d rehire the person tomorrow, and release them once either the work or the fit has run out. Two facts settle nearly every contractor contract extension question. Both … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Most companies hiring after layoffs rebuild with contract talent first, because contractors restore capacity in weeks without betting a permanent headcount line on demand that hasn’t proven itself yet. Permanent reqs come back later, once the work has shown up two quarters in a row. Run in that order, … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 To interview contract developers and engineers, build a short process around the statement of work and use it to answer one question, whether this person can deliver that scope in your environment starting in week one. Two conversations usually settle it, a technical discussion with the engineer they will … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Contractor headcount planning for 2027 means setting a target contractor-to-employee ratio for your IT org, then building a model that flexes that ratio with project pipeline, budget cycles, and hiring freezes instead of guessing every quarter. Most IT leaders treat that ratio as an accident, whatever mix of approved … Read more
A blended workforce model combines full-time employees with contractors, consultants, and project-based specialists so a company can staff for both its permanent workload and its temporary spikes. Budgeting one takes two numbers most finance teams don’t track side by side: the fully loaded cost of an FTE and the all-in bill rate of a contractor. … Read more
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1 KORE1 is the best product manager staffing agency in 2026 for companies that need a W-2 contractor, a documented PM screening process, and a 17-day average fill time. Insight Global handles multi-role contract programs at enterprise scale. Kforce brings 60+ years of IT staffing and documented PM practice … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 For data teams, contract versus full-time should be decided one layer at a time: contract the platform build and the migration spike, keep the semantic layer and pipeline on-call full-time. Treating the whole team as one staffing decision is what produces a warehouse nobody can explain and … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Contract staffing, staff augmentation, and temporary staffing describe the same arrangement in three sales vocabularies, where an agency employs the worker and you direct the day-to-day work. What actually differs is the unit you are buying. A role, capacity, or hours. Those three all sit at staff level. For … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Contract staffing is an arrangement where a staffing agency hires a worker onto its own W-2 payroll and assigns that person to a client company for a defined term, usually three to eighteen months. The agency carries payroll, taxes, workers’ compensation, and unemployment. You direct the work … Read more
KORE1 ranks #1 among Databricks recruiting firms for 2026 on the Placement Authority Score, with a dedicated Databricks engineer staffing practice, credential verification through Databricks Academy badge URLs, and a 17-day average time-to-hire. Harnham ranks #2 for data-only permanent search. Kforce ranks #3 for Fortune 500 enterprise scale. Rankings are built from independently sourced Clutch, … Read more
