Roth Staffing Companies has earned a spot on the 2026 Fortune Best Medium Workplaces list, marking the staffing firm’s 10th appearance in the ranking. The company placed No. 16 this year, improving from No. 24 in 2025, as employee experience, workplace trust and leadership become increasingly important differentiators in the talent market.
Workplace culture has become harder for employers to treat as a soft metric. As companies compete for talent, retain distributed workforces and navigate changing employee expectations, employee feedback is increasingly being used to assess whether workplace policies translate into a positive day-to-day experience.
Roth Staffing’s latest recognition offers one example.
Great Place To Work and Fortune selected Roth Staffing Companies for the 2026 Fortune Best Medium Workplaces list, placing the staffing company at No. 16 among medium-sized employers in the United States. It is Roth Staffing’s 10th appearance on the list and represents a notable improvement over its No. 24 position last year.
The ranking is based on employee feedback rather than a company-submitted workplace narrative. Great Place To Work analyzed responses from more than 240,000 employees working at certified companies with between 100 and 999 U.S. employees to develop the Best Medium Workplaces ranking.
That methodology makes the recognition relevant to the broader HR technology conversation. Employee experience platforms, workforce analytics and employee listening tools increasingly give HR departments ways to measure engagement, sentiment and workplace satisfaction. But survey data remains dependent on whether employees feel comfortable providing honest feedback and whether organizations act on what they hear.
Roth Staffing CEO Adam Roth said the recognition reflects the company’s focus on respect, belonging, trust and opportunity. He also pointed to employee feedback as a central reason the award is significant for the organization.
The distinction is important. Workplace awards often function as employer-branding assets, particularly for staffing companies that compete in a market where their own employees and the candidates they serve are both critical to the business.
For staffing organizations, employee experience has another layer. Recruiters and staffing professionals operate at the intersection of employers and job seekers, meaning their own engagement can influence candidate relationships, client service and ultimately placement outcomes.
That puts workplace culture alongside technology as part of a staffing firm’s operating model.
The HR technology ecosystem is increasingly built around this intersection. Platforms from Workday, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP provide organizations with tools for workforce management, talent development and analytics, while employee experience specialists focus on engagement, listening and workplace communications.
The technology can help organizations identify patterns, but the underlying workplace experience remains a management issue.
Great Place To Work says its broader 2026 workforce study incorporates more than 1.3 million survey responses and data from organizations representing more than 7.3 million employees. Those figures illustrate the scale of employee-experience data now available to organizations attempting to benchmark workplace culture.
The company describes its Best Medium Workplaces methodology as evaluating organizations on workplace experiences across job roles, work status and other employee characteristics. That matters because workplace satisfaction can vary significantly depending on where employees sit within an organization.
For HR leaders, a strong overall engagement score can therefore be less useful than understanding the experience of specific groups. Frontline employees, managers, hybrid workers and newly hired staff may encounter the same organization very differently.
This is where workforce analytics can become more valuable. Rather than treating engagement as an annual survey result, organizations can combine employee feedback with retention, absenteeism, internal mobility and performance data to identify where workplace problems may be emerging.
There is also a leadership component.
Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work, said leadership can have a significant influence on business performance for small and medium-sized companies, describing high-trust leadership as a predictor of future success.
That argument is particularly relevant for mid-sized organizations. Unlike large enterprises, they may have fewer layers between executives and employees, allowing leadership decisions to have an immediate effect on culture. At the same time, rapid growth can make maintaining that culture more difficult.
Roth Staffing’s decade-long presence on the list provides a different signal: consistency.
A single appearance on a workplace ranking can reflect a particular period of employee sentiment. Repeated recognition over 10 years suggests the company has maintained workplace practices that continue to resonate with employees, although the ranking itself should not be treated as a comprehensive measure of every aspect of the employee experience.
The company’s rise from No. 24 to No. 16 also shows that rankings can shift even among established participants. That creates pressure for employers to continuously monitor workplace experience rather than relying on past recognition.
For HR teams, the takeaway is less about winning an award and more about how employee listening becomes part of workforce strategy.
As AI enters HR platforms and organizations increasingly automate recruiting, talent management and workforce analytics, employee trust may become an even more important variable. Technology can streamline processes, but employees still determine whether those processes feel transparent, useful and fair.
Roth Staffing’s latest ranking underscores that point. In a labor market where companies increasingly compete on both technology and employee experience, workplace culture remains a human metric that technology can measure—but cannot manufacture on its own.
Market Landscape
The employee experience market is moving beyond traditional engagement surveys toward continuous workforce intelligence.
Modern HR platforms increasingly combine employee listening, people analytics, talent management, performance data and AI-powered insights. The goal is to give HR leaders a more complete picture of what employees experience and what factors influence retention and productivity.
The competitive landscape includes large enterprise platforms such as Workday, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, alongside specialist employee-experience and workforce analytics providers. These systems can help HR teams identify engagement patterns, analyze workforce sentiment and connect employee feedback with broader workforce metrics.
For medium-sized businesses, however, the challenge is often less about acquiring technology and more about using employee data responsibly. Smaller organizations may have fewer employees from whom to collect data, creating privacy and statistical challenges when analyzing feedback across teams.
Roth Staffing’s recognition highlights another trend: employer brand and employee experience are increasingly interconnected. Staffing companies have to attract and retain their own workforce while simultaneously helping clients compete for talent.
That makes workplace culture an operational consideration, not simply an HR initiative.
Top Insights
- Roth Staffing ranked No. 16 on Fortune’s 2026 Best Medium Workplaces list, its 10th appearance, highlighting sustained employee experience and workplace culture efforts.
- Great Place To Work based the ranking on more than 240,000 employee responses, reinforcing employee feedback’s growing role in workplace benchmarking.
- The recognition highlights how staffing firms increasingly compete through employee experience, leadership trust and employer brand alongside recruitment technology.
- HR platforms from Workday, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP increasingly connect employee feedback with workforce analytics, talent management and organizational decision-making.
- Roth’s move from No. 24 to No. 16 shows that maintaining workplace culture requires ongoing attention as employee expectations and workforce models change.
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