Robert Half just delivered its Q2 print — and the result validated the bears' core thesis, sending the stock down 13% on July 23 before a partial recovery left it at $39.49, still off 4% on the week.
The short interest picture has shifted direction since the pre-earnings notes. Prior to the print, SI had been grinding lower — from roughly 27% of float in late June to around 21.9% by mid-July — as shorts gradually covered into the rally. That trend reversed last week. SI is now back to 22.3% of free float, up about 1.2% on the week, as fresh short positions were added in the wake of the disappointing results. The ORTEX short score holds at 73.8, keeping RHI in the bottom 3rd percentile of the universe — almost every other stock carries less short interest. What hasn't changed is the borrow market dynamic: availability at 178% means roughly 1.8 shares remain available to borrow for every one currently shorted, and the cost to borrow is negligible at 0.55%, up 11% on the week but still barely registering. Shorts are not being squeezed — they rebuilt positions because they could do so cheaply and easily.
Options positioning has grown meaningfully more defensive since the print. The put/call ratio climbed to 0.71 Tuesday, nearly 1.8 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.49 — the most cautious reading in several weeks. Before the Q2 announcement, the PCR had been running in the 0.39–0.42 range through early-to-mid July; the post-print jump to the 0.65–0.71 range represents a clear regime shift in how options traders are hedging the name. That's a meaningful contrast: shorts are rebuilding at the security level, while options traders are layering on puts at the derivatives level — both signals pointing the same direction.
The analyst community remains sharply divided, and the post-earnings reactions widened the gap further. Goldman Sachs raised its Sell target to $29 on July 24 — a modest concession to the stock's prior rally, but still more than 25% below the current price. Truist moved the other way, lifting its Buy target to $50, implying 27% upside from here. The consensus sits at Buy with a mean target of $35, which is actually below the current $39.49 price — a statistical quirk driven by Goldman's $29 target dragging the average below spot. The bear case is clear: Q2 revenues fell 8% year-on-year to $1.35 billion, missing consensus of $1.41 billion, with Contract Talent Solutions and Permanent Placement both down double digits. The bull case rests on a potential return to roughly $7 billion in annual revenue with 13% margins — a scenario that requires a hiring cycle recovery that is not yet visible in the data. The EV/EBITDA multiple is running at 12.3x, up about 0.4x on the week as the stock recovered from its post-earnings low, while the PE has expanded to 23.6x — rich for a company whose trailing earnings are under pressure.
The peer comparison makes the relative weakness harder to ignore. Close correlates MAN and KFY each gained more than 7% on the week, while TNET and CBZ added 14%. RHI fell 4% over the same period. That divergence suggests the post-earnings reset was RHI-specific rather than sector-wide — the staffing and HR sector broadly had a good week, which makes RHI's underperformance sharper by comparison.
With no next earnings event currently flagged and short interest quietly rebuilding post-print, the focus shifts to whether the gradual covering trend that characterised June and early July reasserts itself — or whether the Q2 miss has given fresh short sellers enough conviction to push SI back toward the late-June highs near 27% of float.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open RHI on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
