Staffing Agencies Are Stuck in the Middle of Hiring's Vicious Cycle

Most of the coverage of hiring's "vicious cycle," including Fortune's piece on Indeed CEO Hisayuki Idekoba's comments, looks at candidates and employers. Staffing agencies sit in between, and they're getting squeezed from both directions.

The squeeze

• On the candidate side, agencies face the same flood of AI-written applications as everyone else. Greenhouse's benchmarks put applications per job up 111% since 2022.
• On the client side, employers who are burned out on polished resumes are more skeptical of every resume, including the ones an agency sends over.
• And fake-candidate schemes, which the Fortune article also describes, are a direct risk to an agency's reputation if one reaches a client.

An agency's value has always been doing the screening a client doesn't have time for. When the client can't tell your shortlist from their own inbox, that value gets harder to see.

Send evidence, not another resume

TrueScreenHR has a separate workspace built for agencies. You invite your candidates to the same 17-question structured interview, and when one is a fit you present them to a client company along with your notes. The client sees the scored profile: overall score, five sub-scores, AI summary, full transcript, and the integrity read.

• Your shortlist arrives with evidence of how each candidate reasons, not just a formatted resume.
• The integrity score and fraud-risk rating help you catch AI-heavy or inconsistent interviews before they reach a client.
• Candidates you source stay private to your agency. They don't show up in the public marketplace.

When clients stop trusting resumes, the agency that sends evidence is the one they keep calling.

Your first five candidate invites are free, enough to run one real placement end to end before you choose a plan. Plans cover all your jobs and clients, and you only use up interviews when candidates finish.