Employment placement agencies and executive search services
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in listing employment vacancies and selecting, referring and placing applicants in employment, either on a permanent or temporary basis. The individuals placed are not employees of the placement agencies. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 3,099
- Under 10 employeesA
- 57%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 3,099 Canadian establishments with employees, 57% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 561, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Janitorial, landscaping, security and staffing: low capital and easy to start, so margins are competed down to labour cost. Route density and contract retention decide the outcome.
- Who sets the price
- Tender and the client's procurement; labour is most of the cost.
- The software it runs on
- Workforce scheduling, route and work-order management, staffing front and back office.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 5613 Employment services covers it.
Recruiting is reachable — a founder with a phone can bill a placement fee in the first month, and the 4,708 Canadian establishments in this group are evidence of how little it costs to start. The cut is where the value is settling. AI screening is not a product an entrant can own; it is a feature the employer's system of record is absorbing, and that layer is the one growing. Workday's revenue rose 13% to $9,552M in the year to 31 January 2026, while the agencies sitting above it went backwards: Robert Half's revenues fell to $5,379M from $5,796M, with permanent placement down 10%, and ManpowerGroup's were down 2.1% in constant currency. A screening tool that does not hold the requisition has to buy distribution from the vendor that does, and that vendor ships the same feature to every customer it already bills. The agency side is no kinder: the fee follows the placement, not the brand, a client can run three agencies at one requisition and pay only the one that lands it, and 1,466 of the 4,708 Canadian establishments have fewer than five people. There is no scale position here to buy into, and the layer that is accumulating one is not for sale to an entrant.
The business funds payroll before the invoice clears, which makes it a working-capital business wearing a services costume — every new placement consumes cash and factoring takes the margin that would otherwise fund growth. Gross margins are thin, clients switch on price, and workers switch for a dollar an hour. Screened alongside the general employment-services record at 5613.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch. What the subsector typically runs on: Workforce scheduling, route and work-order management, staffing front and back office.
Catalogued categories — named, not analysed
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.