Agencies, marketplaces, and the myth of disintermediation
Every few years, technology promises to cut out the staffing middleman. The event industry keeps proving it wrong. The real opportunity is interoperability, not replacement.
There is a recurring pitch in workforce technology: the platform that finally disintermediates the staffing agency. It has been pitched roughly every five years since the job board was invented, and event operations keeps refusing to cooperate. The reason is structural. Agencies are not an inefficiency waiting to be optimized away — they are risk absorbers. They hold the bench, carry the workers' comp, know which 40 people will actually show up in the rain, and answer the phone at 4 a.m.
Marketplaces did not kill agencies either; they became another source alongside them. Which means the modern operator's reality is not either/or. It is all-of-the-above: internal staff, union halls, two or three agencies, a gig marketplace, a volunteer program — per event.
The cost of the ecosystem is coordination
What the all-of-the-above workforce lacks is not supply; it is a common language. Demand goes out as PDFs and phone calls. Confirmations come back as spreadsheets in five formats. Nobody sees total coverage until the morning of, and nobody can compare sources on performance because the data lives in five systems, each keeping its own version of the truth.
This is exactly the problem other industries solved with interoperability. Airlines did not disintermediate travel agents; they built GDS rails everyone transacts on. Logistics did not eliminate freight brokers; it gave shippers and carriers shared APIs and let performance data set the prices. Labor for events is the last major operational market still running on fax-machine-era coordination.
What rails change
When every source — agency included — plugs into the same demand plan, three things happen. Operators finally see fill and reliability by source, so procurement becomes evidence-based instead of relationship-based. Agencies compete on what they are actually good at — speed, quality, specialty crews — instead of on opacity. And workers stop falling through the cracks between systems, because there are no cracks: one coverage view, one verified record of hours, regardless of who employs whom.
Disintermediation was always the wrong ambition. The middlemen are fine. The middle is what needed the technology.