How do I calculate redeployment rate?

Take the number of contractors who started a new assignment with you within a set window after their last one ended, then divide by the total number of contractors whose assignments ended in that same window. Most firms use 30 days. If 40 people rolled off and 12 started something new within 30 days, your rate is 30 percent. Run it monthly and watch the trend, not just the single number.

What is a good redeployment rate for a staffing firm?

It depends on your discipline, but most firms that have never measured it land somewhere between 10 and 25 percent. Light industrial and high-volume desks can push past 50 percent with real effort. The point is not hitting a magic number. The point is moving your own number up 10 points, because every point is margin you already earned the right to.

Why is redeployment cheaper than new placements?

You already paid to source, screen, and onboard that worker. You know their skills, their reliability, and their pay expectations. A redeployment skips most of the cost of a fresh hire and fills faster because the candidate is known and available. That is why it drops more profit per placement than net-new business does.

Redeployment Rate: The Metric Staffing Firms Skip

Redeployment rate is the second-least-tracked metric in staffing, according to the 2026 Avionté report. That is a gift for any operator trying to grow revenue per recruiter without hiring. Here is how to fix it this week.

The 2026 Avionté State of Staffing Report found that redeployment rate is the second-least-tracked metric in the industry. Most firms watch fill rate, time-to-fill, and gross margin every day. Almost nobody watches whether the people they already placed come back for a second assignment.

That is a strange blind spot, because redeployment is one of the cheapest revenue dollars a staffing firm can earn. You already paid to find that worker. You already screened them, onboarded them, and learned what they are good at. Putting them on a new assignment skips most of the cost of a brand-new placement and fills the order faster.

If you run a PE-backed portfolio or carry a VP title and a revenue number, this should get your attention. You can grow revenue per recruiter without adding a single head. The lever is sitting in your ATS right now, unmeasured.

Why Redeployment Beats Net-New Revenue

Every new placement carries a cost before it ever earns a dollar. Job board spend. Recruiter hours screening. Background checks and onboarding paperwork. A no-show on day one that sends you back to square one.

A redeployment skips most of that. The candidate is known, available, and already cleared. Your recruiter spends minutes, not days, getting them back to work. That means more placements per recruiter per week, which is the number PE operators actually care about.

Run the math on a 40-person contractor desk. Say 40 assignments end in a month and your redeployment rate is 15 percent. That is 6 people back to work. Push the rate to 30 percent and you put 12 people back to work from the same roll-off pool. You just doubled redeployment volume with zero new sourcing spend.

Now multiply that across every desk in a portfolio. Six extra placements a month at one branch is interesting. Six extra placements a month across 20 branches is a different conversation with your sponsor.

The Reason Most Firms Do Not Track It

It is not laziness. It is that redeployment falls between the cracks.

When an assignment ends, the recruiter is already chasing the next open order. The contractor rolls off and disappears from the active list. Nobody owns the question of what happens to that person next. The order closed, the metric that closed it got logged, and the worker is gone.

Three things usually break the redeployment loop:

No trigger. Nobody gets an alert when an assignment is ending in five days. The recruiter finds out when the contractor is already off the books.
No owner. Sourcing recruiters chase new candidates. Account managers chase new orders. Redeploying an existing worker belongs to nobody.
No number. What does not get measured does not get managed. If redeployment rate never shows up on a dashboard, it never becomes a goal.

Fix those three things and the rate moves. It is not complicated work. It is just work nobody assigned yet.

How To Start Tracking It This Quarter

You do not need a new tech stack. You need a definition, a report, and one owner.

Step 1: Define the window

Pick a redeployment window and write it down. Thirty days is standard. A contractor who starts a new assignment within 30 days of their last one ending counts as a redeployment. Anything longer than that is closer to a re-source, and you want to know the difference.

Step 2: Pull the baseline

Your ATS already has assignment start and end dates. Pull every assignment that ended in the last 90 days. Flag which of those workers started a new assignment within 30 days. Divide and you have your rate. Do not skip this. You cannot improve a number you have never seen.

Step 3: Build the trigger

Set an alert that fires five to seven days before any assignment ends. That alert goes to a named person. Their job is one thing: line up the next assignment before the worker rolls off. This single change does more for your rate than anything else on the list.

Step 4: Assign the owner

Pick who owns redeployment. On a small team it might be the same recruiter who placed the worker. On a bigger desk it might be a dedicated redeployment coordinator. The title does not matter. What matters is that one person wakes up responsible for the number.

AI tools help here. A well-set-up system can flag ending assignments, match the rolling-off worker against open orders, and draft the outreach before a human touches it. That is the kind of operational lift worth building, and you can read more about it on our staffing AI page.

Making The Change Stick

Tracking the number is the easy part. Getting recruiters to act on it is where firms stall.

If your comp plan pays the same for a hard net-new placement and an easy redeployment, recruiters will chase whatever feels like more credit. Put redeployment in the scorecard. Talk about it in the Monday meeting. Show the rate climbing on the same wall where you show fill rate.

This is a behavior change, not a software install. The firms that win at it treat it like one. If you want the playbook for making operational changes hold, we wrote about that in making change stick.

Here is your move this week. Pull the last 90 days of ended assignments out of your ATS and calculate your redeployment rate. Just the one number. Most operators are shocked by how low it is and how much room sits above it. Once you have the baseline, you have something to manage. And once you manage it, you have growth that costs you almost nothing.

Your Redeployment Rate Is Leaving Money on the Table