Death and taxes may be the only certainty in life as a whole, but for the US staffing industry, a significant drop in activity in the last week in November is also so regular you could set your clock by it.

After solid gains throughout the autumn, which took it to a near two-year high, the Staffing Index produced by the American Staffing Association (ASA) dropped by 5.1% in the last week of November, which also included the Thanksgiving holiday.

Such a drop has been seen every year since 2007 in the Index, which started in 2006 – and frequently the late November drop has been the largest seen all year outside of the very first and last weeks of the year.

This is in contrast to the end of October, when Hurricane Sandy made little impact on the index despite shutting down much of the East Coast of North America for business – with the score staying identical through the week of the storm, but dropping slightly (by 0.66%) the week before.