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How Big Is the Talent Acquisition Market?

It’s big. The end.

In all seriousness, if you look at the universe of talent acquisition, it’s enormous. The staffing and headhunter space alone is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. When you include technology that might live outside the typical talent acquisition department — technologies and services like vendor or freelance management — it becomes easily a more than half-trillion-dollar industry.

That’s some Scrooge McDuck money flowing into talent acquisition every year and it’s not slowing down — we’re expecting a double-digit compound annual growth rate for the next few years. In our 2017 Talent Acquisition Brandscape Report™, we take a closer look at this market. Here are a few things that helped us size up where everything is at.

Public Reporting
There are a few companies that publicly report revenues and customer numbers in talent acquisition. We look to see what growth looks like in those companies, along with following analysts who try to understand standout vendor activity across different segments of the market.

Private Research
We take briefings with organizations every month to understand their own revenue, customer, and growth figures. We take these numbers with a grain of salt, especially if they fall out of line with the rest of the industry — especially along the lines of revenue per employee.

Investor Activity
Of course, one thing we can easily track is investor activity, and given the disclosures and processes that organizations have to go through, we can get a pretty good analogue for what that company is pulling down from the revenue side to help us get more certainty to our market measures.

If you want to know how big the talent acquisition market is, make sure to sign up to get notified when our newest report, the 2017 Talent Acquisition Brandscape Report™, is released. It should be out next week and will go into even greater detail on brand and market presence, market sizing, and trends that every vendor, investor, or close follower of the industry should know.