Why Most "Get More Job Orders" Content Is So Thin
Search this exact question and you will find generic, six-point listicles with no data behind them: "network more," "follow up consistently," "build relationships." One of the higher-ranking pages on this query runs six vague sections and cites nothing. That is not a criticism of any one writer; it reflects how little of this category bothers to cite ASA, SIA, or any primary source before publishing advice about how staffing firms should sell.
This guide is built the other way. Every number below is sourced, and where a claim is directional rather than confirmed, it says so.
Start With the Market You Are Actually Selling Into
The US staffing industry peaked at $243.9 billion in 2022, then corrected hard. SIA's March 2026 forecast puts 2026 at $180.2 billion, still below the $185.5 billion pre-pandemic baseline. But the quarterly trend has turned: Q1 2026 sales came in at $27.6 billion, down only 1.6% year over year, the narrowest year-over-year gap since 2023 and the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022. ASA's own weekly index showed staffing jobs 5.6% higher in mid-June 2026 than the same week a year earlier.
ASA president and CEO Stephen Dwyer summarized it plainly: "First quarter sales, payroll, and employment all recorded their smallest declines in years, providing reasons for optimism for the remainder of the year." Read that correctly: it is not a rebound, it is bleeding that has slowed but has not healed. That distinction should shape how you pitch a prospect. "The market is recovering" is not yet a true sentence you can defend. "The decline has stopped accelerating, and firms that are prospecting now are picking up share from firms that stopped" is.
The Real Reason Job Orders Are Hard to Get: Recruiters Doing Their Own BD
Staffing sales trainer Dan Fisher, quoted by Haley Marketing, put the structural problem into one line: "We're still applying sales practices we were doing when I got into the industry in the mid-90s." He goes further: "I've worked with salespeople in the industry for 10+ years, and some of them still sound like it's their first cold call." The default model at most firms is a recruiter or account manager doing outbound between candidate work, with no dedicated, trained BD function behind it. That is the direct cause of the stagnant-practice complaint Fisher describes, and it is also why most staffing firms never grow past $10 million in revenue.
The Touch Count Nobody Talks About
One staffing-sales-strategy source states that decision-makers now require an average of 7 to 10 touches before a meaningful response. Treat that figure as a single-source, directional estimate rather than an audited statistic, but it lines up with what every appointment-setting vendor selling into this vertical actually builds: not one of them sells a single-call product. They all sell multichannel sequences across weeks. If your current process is one call, one voicemail, and a follow-up email that never gets sent, you are stopping somewhere around touch 2 or 3 in a race that, by this evidence, runs closer to 10.
Three Channels That Still Produce Job Orders
Cold calling remains the highest-converting channel when it is done well, per Haley Marketing's research, but it is broken by default in staffing because of the stagnant-practice problem above. The fix trend across the vendors reviewed for this guide is multichannel (call plus email plus LinkedIn), not abandoning the phone.
Most Placeable Candidate (MPC) marketing is a real, taught technique: lead with an exceptional candidate rather than an open job order, and market that person into target accounts as a value-first door-opener. It is covered in more depth, with the actual process, in the companion guide linked below.
Splits networks are a distinct channel worth naming honestly: a live Reddit thread on r/recruiting asking "How do you get job orders?" got the answer "You could join a splits network or a network with job orders to fill. Bounty Jobs/Relode/etc." That is not outbound BD at all, it is trading job orders and candidates for split fees, and it is worth knowing about even if it is not the focus of this guide.
If Outbound Beats Doing It Yourself, Here Is the Other Option
If the touch-count math above sounds like more capacity than your recruiters have between placements, VA Horizon's Human + AI SDRs run the outreach for you. They hold real SMS conversations with hiring managers, built natively on the VA Horizon Private CRM, not phone calls or cold email blasts. Every booked, double-confirmed meeting ships with the SMS transcript and a 24-hour, 2-hour, and 15-minute confirmation log as proof. Staffing runs $300 to $550 per booked meeting with a flat $300 one-time setup, no retainer, and no-shows are never billed.
What this means for you
- ASA's Q1 2026 data shows the smallest year-over-year decline since 2023, which supports a "take share, don't wait for recovery" pitch, not a "the market is booming" one.
- The stagnant-practice problem Dan Fisher describes, recruiters doing their own BD between placements, is the structural reason most firms never scale their new-client pipeline.
- The 7-to-10-touch estimate is single-source and directional, but every vendor in this category builds multichannel sequences, not one-call outreach, which corroborates the direction if not the exact number.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- ASA, "Seasonal declines narrow in first quarter of 2026"
- ASA, "Employment and sales rebound in Q4"
- ASA, Staffing Industry Playbook 2025 (weekly index data)
- QX Global Group, US staffing market size forecast
- Haley Marketing, "Is Cold Calling Still Effective for Staffing Agencies?"
- Reddit r/recruiting, "How do you get job orders?"