Robert Half Inc.

Who owns Robert Half?

Robert Half Inc. is a public company on the NYSE under RHI, owned by institutional and retail investors. The founding family holds no controlling stake.

Is Robert Half a staffing agency?

Yes, the world's largest specialized staffing firm, placing finance, accounting, technology, administrative, legal, and creative professionals in temporary and permanent roles.

What is Protiviti?

Protiviti is Robert Half's consulting subsidiary, a global firm focused on internal audit, risk, business performance, and technology consulting, generating roughly a third of revenue.

When was Robert Half founded?

1948 in New York City, founded by Robert Half as an employment agency for finance and accounting professionals.

What is Robert Half's ticker?

RHI on the NYSE, a long-tenured public company and S&P 500 component.

How does Robert Half make money?

Staffing revenue from the spread between client billing and worker pay plus permanent placement fees, and consulting fees from Protiviti's project work.

Is Robert Half still headquartered in New York?

No. It is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, though it was founded in New York City in 1948.

Robert Half founded his employment agency in 1948 in New York City, building a practice around placing finance and accounting professionals. The insight was specialization: rather than a general employment agency, focus on one professional category where expertise mattered, a model that became the foundation of specialized staffing.

The company expanded through the postwar decades as the corporate economy grew. It pioneered temporary professional staffing, moving beyond permanent placement to the emerging temp market, and went public in 1970. Its specialization model was later extended across categories: technology, legal, administrative, and creative staffing through divisions like Accountemps, OfficeTeam, and Creative Group.

Protiviti was the major strategic addition. Robert Half acquired the internal audit and consulting practice in 2002 from Arthur Andersen alumni, building it into a global consulting firm focused on risk, internal audit, and performance improvement. It grew into a roughly $2 billion business that now produces about a third of revenue and a different economic profile than staffing.

Leadership passed to M. Keith Waddell in 2019, a company veteran who had run Protiviti and the international business. His tenure has navigated the pandemic labor market volatility, the remote-work shift that changed staffing dynamics, and a softening labor market in the mid-2020s that pressured staffing revenue while Protiviti held steadier.

As a staffing and professional services company, Robert Half's footprint is offices and the people it places. Its sustainability reporting focuses on workforce practices, diversity in its own hiring, and the social role of employment services.

Its core ethics position is in labor practices: how it treats placed workers, pay equity in its temporary staffing, and the quality of the employment it facilitates. As a staffing company its business model itself creates questions about worker classification, benefits for temp workers, and the ethics of the temp economy, issues it manages as a major industry player.

Protiviti's consulting work carries standard advisory ethics around independence in internal audit and the quality of its professional opinions.

Robert Half has avoided major conduct scandals. Its controversies are the structural ones facing staffing: periodic questions about temporary worker treatment, wage practices, and the economics of the staffing model, where the spread between billing and pay creates inherent tension.

Labor market regulation affects it directly: rules around worker classification, temp worker rights, and pay equity vary by jurisdiction and shape its operations. It maintains compliance as a heavily regulated industry participant.

The cyclical pressures of the mid-2020s labor market slowdown produced investor scrutiny of its revenue trajectory, a commercial challenge rather than a conduct issue, though it has prompted strategic questions about whether Protiviti should be a larger share of the business for stability.