What counts as a redeployment in staffing?

A redeployment is when you place a contractor on a new assignment after their current one ends, with little or no gap. You already sourced them, screened them, and onboarded them. The second placement costs a fraction of the first because you skip most of the recruiting work. That's why it carries higher margin.

What is a good redeployment rate to aim for?

Most firms that track it well land between 30% and 50% of ending assignments redeployed. If you are starting from zero tracking, your first goal is just to measure it. Get a real number, then push it up 5 to 10 points a quarter. Even a modest lift drops straight to margin because the cost to place is so low.

We use an ATS already. Why aren't we tracking this?

Most ATS platforms can calculate redeployment rate, but the field is off by default or nobody built the report. The data is sitting in your system. The problem is process and ownership, not technology. Someone has to define the metric, pull it weekly, and put it in front of recruiters.

The Redeployment Revenue Leak in Staffing Firms

Nearly half of staffing firms don't track redeployment rate, according to the Avionté 2026 State of Staffing Report. That's the cheapest, fastest, highest-margin placement you can make. Here's how to stop the leak this quarter.

Nearly half of staffing firms don't track their highest-margin placement. The Avionté 2026 State of Staffing Report puts the number at 48%. That's the share of agencies with no line of sight into their redeployment rate.

Redeployment is the cheapest placement you will ever make. You already found the person. You already screened them, checked their references, ran the background, and got them through onboarding. When their assignment ends and you put them on a new one, you skip almost all of that cost. The margin on that second placement is dramatically higher than the first.

And 48% of firms are flying blind on it.

If you run ops for a PE-backed portfolio, this is the rare fix that needs no new tech, no new hires, and no six-month rollout. The data already lives in your ATS. You just have to look at it.

Why redeployment beats new placements every time

Run the math on a single new placement. You pay for the job posting or the sourcing tool. You pay a recruiter's time to screen 20 people to find one. You pay for the background check and drug screen. You pay for onboarding. By the time that contractor starts, you have spent real money before you bill a dime.

Now run the math on redeploying that same contractor when their assignment ends. The sourcing cost is zero. The screening is done. The onboarding is done. Your recruiter spends an hour matching them to an open req instead of three days building a pipeline from scratch.

Same bill rate. A fraction of the cost. That gap is pure margin.

Here is the part most firms miss. Every contractor who finishes an assignment and walks away is a double loss. You lose the redeployment revenue, and you pay full price to replace the headcount they would have filled. A 25% redeployment rate versus a 40% rate is not a small difference. On a firm running 500 contractors, that's 75 extra placements a year at near-zero acquisition cost.

Why so many firms ignore it

The number is high because redeployment falls between the cracks. New placements get celebrated. Recruiters get comped on them. There's a leaderboard, a Slack ping, a number on the wall.

Redeployment gets none of that. The assignment ends quietly. The contractor moves on. Nobody owns the moment, so nobody acts on it.

Three things drive the gap:

No metric. You can't manage what you don't measure. If redeployment rate isn't on the dashboard, it isn't a priority.
No owner. When an assignment is ending, who is responsible for getting that person on the next one? In most firms the answer is nobody specific.
No comp. Recruiters chase what pays them. If a fresh placement pays the same as a redeployment, they'll chase the one that feels like a win.

None of these are technology problems. They're process and ownership problems. That's good news, because those are faster to fix than a system migration.

The 30-day fix for ops leaders

You can close most of this gap in a month. Here's the order of operations.

Week 1: Get the number

Pull your redeployment rate from your ATS. Define it cleanly: of all assignments that ended in the last 90 days, what percentage of those contractors started a new assignment within 14 days? Write the definition down so everyone measures it the same way. If your system can't pull it, your ATS admin can usually build the report in an afternoon.

Week 2: Put it on the dashboard

Add redeployment rate to your weekly ops review. Show it by branch, by recruiter, and by client. You will find pockets. One branch runs 45%, another runs 18%. Now you know where the leak is and who already cracked it.

Week 3: Assign the owner

Build an end-of-assignment trigger. Fourteen days before a contractor's assignment ends, someone gets an alert and starts working them toward the next placement. Name that person. It can be the recruiter who placed them or a dedicated redeployment desk. It just can't be nobody.

Week 4: Tie it to comp

Put a number on redeployment in the comp plan. It doesn't have to match a new placement, but it has to be real. When recruiters see redeployment on their scorecard and in their paycheck, the behavior changes fast.

This is a Build. Change. Adopt. problem. The build is small, just a report and a trigger. The change is the process and the comp. The adopt is the part that decides whether it sticks. Most firms get the report built and stop there. The number goes on a dashboard nobody acts on, and six months later the rate hasn't moved.

Adoption is where the margin lives. If recruiters don't change what they do on a Tuesday morning, nothing changes. That means showing the number every week, coaching the low performers using your high performers' playbook, and making the comp real enough to notice.

What this is worth

Take a portfolio firm running 1,000 active contractors with average assignments turning over a few times a year. Moving redeployment rate from 25% to 40% can mean 100 to 150 additional placements annually, most of them at a fraction of normal acquisition cost. That difference doesn't get eaten by sourcing spend or recruiter hours. It drops close to the bottom line.

For a PE-backed operator, that's the kind of operational lever that shows up in EBITDA without a single new hire or tool. It's the cheapest margin you'll find this year, and right now half your competitors aren't even looking at it.

Do this week: Pull your redeployment rate from your ATS for the last 90 days. Just get the number. If you can't pull it, ask your ATS admin to build the report by Friday. You can't fix the leak until you know how big it is.

The Redeployment Revenue Leak: Why 48% of Staffing Firms Ignore Their Highest-Margin Growth Lever