There has been “a marked improvement in sentiment” among staffing company owners in the last three months, according to John O’Sullivan, owner and chairman of peer-to-peer learning and personal development forum Elite Leaders.

Based on a poll taken at Elite Leaders’ monthly meetings, attended by around 100 owners of predominantly niche staffing companies, O’Sullivan says the ‘Elite Barometer’ has risen from five to six in the last four to five months. “This is not what I had expected,” he adds.

The ‘barometer’ is calculated on the basis of three questions asked at each monthly meeting, with each business owner asked to rank the following on a scale of 0-7: 

• how they feel about the market generally

• how they feel about their own sector

• how they feel about their own agency

These responses are then used to create a composite figure or index.

O’Sullivan says the biggest improvement has been in owners’ confidence about the performance of their own companies.

“While there is a lot of uncertainty, the results show that by and large niche recruitment agencies are holding up,” he says.

Last week data from the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo) indicated that while the Olympics had slowed professional hiring overall, both IT and engineering had performed strongly.