The Best Part of the Staffing Business Is Not Publicly Traded

Emily Gordon, the SVP of Talent Solutions at Randall Reilly, was named to a list called the Talent 100. It is an annual recruiting industry award. The press release notes she has nearly three decades of experience and has become a "thoughtful voice on AI in recruiting."

That was not weird or surprising. But it pointed me toward something that is useful if you are trying to find where the staffing and recruiting business is actually going.

Randall Reilly is a privately held company, owned by the middle-market private equity firm Aurora Capital Partners since 2017. It has roughly $126 million in revenue and about 390 employees. You cannot buy it. But the business model it runs — Recruitment Process Outsourcing, or RPO — is the fastest-growing part of a massive industry, and it is the one piece of the staffing economy that looks like a real subscription business instead of a pay-per-hire gig operation. The publicly traded staffing companies have RPO in them somewhere. The question is whether you can find it, and whether it changes how you think about these stocks.

What RPO actually is

The staffing industry is enormous. The American Staffing Association counts about 11 million workers flowing through staffing agencies in the U.S., and the broader staffing industry generates well over $100 billion in revenue. But most of it — temporary staffing, contract labor, placement fees — is a transactional business. The staffing firm sends a worker, charges a markup on the hourly rate, and the relationship resets when the assignment ends. Revenue is cyclical, margin-thin, and tied to the labor market like a weather vane.

RPO is different. In RPO, a company hands over part or all of its hiring function to a specialist firm. Not for one hire. Not for a temp worker. The RPO provider builds a recruiting team inside the client's organization, uses the client's ATS, speaks in the client's brand, and manages the whole pipeline. The RPO firm gets paid a recurring management fee, a per-hire fee, or some hybrid — but the key feature is that the relationship is structural, not transactional. It lasts months or years, not days.

The global RPO market was valued at roughly $9.7 billion in 2024 and projected to reach about $23 billion by 2030, growing at roughly 15% a year. Some estimates put the CAGR higher, near 17%. Either way, this is a business model growing three to four times faster than the staffing industry overall.

Randall Reilly operates in the part of RPO that matters most for understanding the economics: trucking and industrial hiring, where turnover is brutal and the volume of hires is enormous. A trucking company with 500 trucks might need to hire 150 to 200 drivers every year just to stay flat. The RPO model converts what used to be a chaotic, expensive scramble into a managed function. And for the RPO provider, it creates something that looks a lot like recurring revenue — in an industry that barely has any.

The publicly traded problem

Here is where the plumbing gets interesting. If RPO is the fastest-growing, stickiest part of staffing, why don't the public staffing stocks trade like growth companies?

ManpowerGroup (MAN), the largest publicly traded staffing firm, had $18 billion in revenue in 2025. It trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 0.14x and an EV/EBITDA of 9.5x. It pays a dividend with a 2.5% yield. It is valued like a mature, slow-growth service business — and right now, after a dramatic recovery from the 2024 downturn, it is trading at a negative forward P/E because the market is struggling to project when the next slowdown hits.

ManpowerGroup has an RPO business — it's part of its "Talent Solutions" segment, which also includes MSP (Managed Service Provider) operations. But in 2024, management reported that RPO revenue was declining. The segment was dragged down by it. Even at the scale of an $18 billion company, RPO has not been the growth engine the industry-wide numbers suggest.

Allegis Group, the world's largest privately held talent firm at $12.3 billion in revenue, is owned by the CVC family — it is not publicly traded either. Its Aerotek brand, the second-largest U.S. industrial staffing provider with $2.75 billion in 2025 revenue, is primarily a temporary staffing operation, not RPO. The biggest RPO players in the market are a mix of private companies and small divisions inside much larger firms.

So you have this pattern: the most attractive part of the staffing business — RPO, with its recurring revenue and long contracts — is concentrated in private companies and buried inside conglomerates. The publicly traded pieces you can actually buy are mostly temporary staffing operations, which are cyclical, low-margin, and priced accordingly.

What this means for the investment case

If you are looking for exposure to the staffing and recruiting industry, the market gives you two choices with very different economics.

The temporary staffing model — which is what MAN and most of the public space actually is — runs on labor market momentum. When unemployment is low and companies are desperate for bodies, temp staffing surges. When the labor market softens, revenue drops fast and the stocks get hammered. The margins are thin (ManpowerGroup reported $455 million in operating profit on $18 billion in revenue in 2025 — a 2.5% operating margin), and the valuation reflects that fragility.

The RPO model is structurally different. Longer contracts, recurring fees, deeper client integration. It should be less cyclical and more valuable. But it is not sitting in your brokerage account under a ticker symbol. The companies that do it best — like Randall Reilly, and firms like Catapult HR, Hueman, Hyrian, and HireVelocity — are all private. And when RPO is bundled inside a large publicly traded firm, it gets lost in a revenue mix dominated by the cyclical, low-margin temp business.

MAN's 0.14x price-to-sales ratio tells you exactly what the market thinks about staffing revenue. It is not pricing in a growth narrative. It is pricing in a business where last year's surge can reverse next quarter, where every dollar of revenue carries roughly 97 cents of cost, and where the dividend is the main reason to hold the stock. The stock has risen 92% year-to-date from a depressed base, but the forward valuation is still that of a mature, fragile service business.

The Talent 100 award to Emily Gordon is not an investment signal. But the business model she works in is one worth understanding, because it reveals a structural gap in what is investable. The best part of the staffing business — the part that looks like recurring revenue, long contracts, and structural growth — is mostly off-limits to retail investors. The publicly traded piece is the slower, more cyclical, less profitable part.

That does not mean MAN is a bad stock at this valuation. A 2.5% dividend yield on a business trading at 9.5x EV/EBITDA is not unreasonable if the labor market stabilizes. But it also means you should not buy it expecting to participate in the RPO growth story. The plumbing does not work that way. The growth engine is owned by private equity, and the public market gets the rest.