Updated October 2026
Selling a staffing or recruiting agency
Your agency sells on client accounts, margin and the recruiters who hold the relationships. Behind that sit years of job intakes, screening notes, submittals and recruiter training, and AI companies now pay to license a copy of records like these. micro1 names recruiting firms among the fields it wants, and the hard part, as you would guess, is that candidates are people.1
Who fits
Do temps on assignment count?
Ask each buyer, because temporary workers may not be counted the way your internal staff are. Most buyers want 20 to 30 or more people, and a few state no minimum. A recruiting desk of a dozen may only fit some of them, so the quiz asks your size and introduces you to the buyers that take an agency like yours.2,3,4,5,6
Before you answer, count your internal recruiters, account managers and payroll staff separately from the temps out on assignment, and note your headcount in the agency's busiest year. Those two numbers settle most of the fit question on a first call.
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| Industries micro1 names | Technology; BPOs and recruiting firms; financial services; consulting; professional services; legal and compliance; healthcare administration; logistics and operations |
| Who Mode takes | Most businesses or nonprofits need 20+ full-time US office employees; accounting firms 10+ and law firms 6+; several years of records they own |
| Who Grepped takes | No headcount minimum stated; its form lists industries from accounting, construction and legal to logistics, manufacturing and software |
What stays out
Candidates are people
Bullhorn and other ATS tools are mostly records about individuals: resumes, interview notes, pay, references. Buyers say they take that out, by removing names, emails and phone numbers, having personal data scrubbed and letting you leave out whole systems or sensitive employee records. What survives is narrower than the ATS.7,8,9
What is yours rather than a candidate's: job intake templates, screening question banks, recruiter training, the playbook for a hard-to-fill req, the way recruiters write submittals, and your onboarding steps, from I-9 checklists to timesheet rules. Written down well, those are the repeated workflows buyers say they look for, and call recordings and email are in especially high demand.10,11,4
Money and pitfalls
What it pays, and one thing to watch
No staffing deal has been published. Published ranges mostly run from $100K to $2M, as the buyers' own claims, and most buyers charge sellers nothing.12,13,14,15,16,17
Staffing has an odd overlap: some AI data companies also recruit, through talent referral programs and contractor referral bonuses, so a data conversation can drift toward your candidates. Keep the two separate in writing.18,19
If you are being acquired, the buyer will usually take over the ATS and the client contracts. Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz writes that a prior data sale comes up in diligence, so raise any license before the letter of intent.20
A good first step is a short folder of what is plainly the agency's: the intake form, the screening question bank, a recruiter training deck and a few submittals with the candidate's details blacked out. That is enough for a buyer to say whether your desk is a fit, and nothing from the ATS has to leave at that stage.
FAQ
Questions, answered with sources
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Questions to talk through with your buyer
Every business is different, so these are best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over them with you before anything is signed.
Questions for this kind of business
- Do our client staffing agreements restrict using submittals and job orders?
- How do CCPA, GDPR, UK GDPR and state privacy laws apply, and is de-identified data still personal information?
- How are employee data, union contracts and NLRA questions handled?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?