Content Marketing for Staffing Agencies: Price a Placement First, Then Decide What the Content Has to Produce

Before anybody writes a word, price one placement. A direct hire fee at 18 to 25 percent of a $90,000 salary is $16,200 to $22,500 of revenue from a single filled requisition. A temporary placement billed at a 45 to 65 percent markup on a $28 an hour pay rate returns roughly $4 to $8 an hour of gross profit, which across a six month assignment is $4,000 to $8,000. Those are my own figures for the US market, not quoted rates, and that arithmetic decides everything: a programme at $2,000 to $6,000 a month has to produce two to four extra direct hires a year to pay for itself. Most staffing content underperforms because nobody did the sum before approving a calendar.

You are publishing to your customer and your supplier at the same time

This is what makes staffing content unlike content for any other service business. A hiring manager is buying speed and certainty. A candidate is deciding whether to trust you with their next two years. Both read the same site, and the piece that impresses one often repels the other.

Averaging them is the mistake. A blog alternating between interview tips and the case for outsourcing recruitment reads as unfocused to both. Split the house:

• Client content sits with the service pages: cost, time to fill, risk, headcount planning. That reader is weighing you against an internal recruiter and against doing nothing.
• Candidate content gets its own marked section: pay, progression, what the assignment is really like. That reader is comparing you against four agencies who called this week.
• One asset is deliberately shared, and it is the pay data. The client needs to know what the role costs and the candidate needs to know what they are worth. Same table, one page, two audiences, and the most valuable thing a staffing firm can publish.

Shelf life is the actual strategy

Staffing firms spend most of their content effort on the shortest lived material they own. Price the life of each asset before funding it.

Asset	Useful life	What it costs to make, my read
Individual job posting	Days to three weeks	Near zero, and it should stay near zero
Available candidate list for clients	One to two weeks	An hour of recruiter time, weekly
Pay and salary guide for your roles and metros	Twelve to twenty four months	$3,000 to $9,000 for a dated edition, less if you hold the data
Hiring process guide for managers	Two to four years	$400 to $1,200 written, plus a recruiter interview
Annual market report for your sector	A year, then replaced	$4,000 to $12,000 with design

None of that says stop posting jobs. It says the job board is the transaction layer and the four lower rows are the asset layer, and firms who say content does nothing for them are usually funding only the top two.

The pay guide stopped being optional

A growing list of US states now require a pay range in a job posting, Colorado, California, Washington, New York and Illinois among them, with thresholds and detail differing in each, and several cities have their own versions. If you recruit across state lines your postings already carry ranges in some markets and not others, which looks careless to a candidate comparing two of your own listings.

So publish a dated pay guide covering every role and metro you work in, and write the postings from it. One defensible source ends the argument with the client who wants to advertise below market, and it is the most linked asset type in this category, because journalists, candidates and hiring managers all need the number. Confirm the current requirement for each state you post into, since these statutes change every legislative session.

Four assets that bring in requisitions

• The pay and rate guide, dated and by metro. Build it first.
• The true cost comparison for clients. A direct hire including your fee, against a temp to perm conversion, against leaving the seat empty, with real numbers on overtime, error rates and manager time. It justifies your fee without ever arguing about your fee.
• The ten day interview process guide. For the hiring manager who loses candidates by taking five weeks to decide. Stages, who attends, what each stage tests. It makes you the person who fixes their process rather than the vendor who sends resumes.
• The role specific candidate brief. Not generic interview advice. What a CDL driver, a medical coder or a travel nurse should ask before accepting an assignment. Candidates share these, and candidate supply is what limits your revenue.

Who writes it when every recruiter is on the phone

Producing staff are on calls all day and their time is worth more there, so do not ask recruiters to write. Interview them. Twenty minutes with a desk recruiter who fills the same role fifty times a year gives you material no outside writer could invent, and a writer turns it into a piece for $250 to $700.

Budget shape for a firm of five to thirty internal staff, my working read: $2,000 to $4,000 a month for two client pieces, two candidate pieces and the weekly hot list, rising to $4,000 to $6,000 in the year you build a pay guide and a sector report. Under about $1,500 a month the calendar fills up with things that expire.

The rules your job content is written under

Three areas matter more here than in most content programmes, and none is complicated once somebody owns it.

• Posting copy. Federal employment law prohibits advertising a preference based on protected characteristics, so wording such as recent graduate, young and energetic, or a citizenship preference beyond what the role legally requires has no place in a posting. Write to the work and the qualifications.
• Pay ranges. State by state, and the published range must be one you would pay.
• Screening. Third party background and credit checks fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires a standalone written disclosure and the candidate's authorisation beforehand, and a defined adverse action process after. Content describing your process should describe it as it really runs.

On temporary and contract work, keep the copy clear about who the employer of record is. Loose talk about our team and our employees in client facing content is a co-employment question waiting to be asked.

Measuring a programme when the deal closes four months later

• Inbound requisitions where the contact names a piece, captured on the form and first call.
• Applications per filled role by source. Content that lifts candidate supply raises revenue even with no new clients.
• Pay guide downloads by company, the nearest thing here to intent.
• Time to fill where the client read the process guide, against the rest. That number renews a client.
• Cost per placement from content, reviewed quarterly, because the cycle is longer than a month.

Staffing content, as owners and recruiting leads ask about it

Should a staffing agency write for jobseekers or for hiring managers?

Both, in separate sections with separate navigation. Candidate supply and client demand are two different shortages, and whichever is limiting revenue this quarter is where the next four pieces go. Ask again next quarter.

How often should a recruiting firm publish?

Weekly for the hot list, which is a sales motion rather than content, and two to four substantial pieces a month on top. Twelve excellent assets and a current pay guide beat two hundred posts and no data.

Do candidate articles bring in clients?

Indirectly and reliably. Hiring managers read what is aimed at the people they want to hire, because it tells them what those people care about. The pay guide and the candidate brief get forwarded inside client companies more than anything written for clients.

How detailed does the pay guide have to be?

Role, metro, pay range at three experience levels, bill rate or markup where you can publish it, how the data was gathered, the period covered, and a date on the front. Update it the same month each year.

Can we use AI to write job descriptions at volume?

For a first draft from your own intake notes, yes, and it saves real recruiter time. Keep a human check on three things before anything posts: the pay range is one you would pay, the requirements are what the client will actually interview against, and no wording expressing a preference about a protected characteristic has crept in.

If the gap you are trying to close is ownership of the programme rather than the content itself, see what a recruitment marketing specialist owns.

Both sides of your market now ask an assistant before they ask you

A plant manager who needs six maintenance technicians and a controls engineer weighing a new contract do the same thing before either calls anybody. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity which firms place that role in that region, and the reply is a short list of named agencies.

What feeds that reply is published material: your pay data, your role pages, your reviews on employer and candidate sites, the places your recruiters are quoted. A firm that fills the role better than anyone in the state and has published nothing about it is not on that list, and the client never learns it existed. Put the question in your buyer's words, then in your candidate's, and read both sets of names. If you want it done properly rather than once, that is the job AI Knows Us does, and the first check at aiknowsus.com is free.