Insight Global Brand Guidelines: Atlanta 2001, Shared Values & Private-Equity Owners

Two recruiters start a staffing firm.

Insight Global is a staffing company based in Atlanta, Georgia. English Wikipedia says it was incorporated in Georgia in May 2001 by Glenn Johnson and Scott Madden, two recruiters who had worked in the Allegis Group staffing network, and that it ran from a home office in Atlanta before opening offices across the Southeastern United States. The company gives the same year on its own website: “Since 2001, we have been building exceptional teams, taking care of them, and delivering results.”

The timing was unusual. Wikipedia notes that the firm launched while the technology sector was contracting after the dot-com bubble. Its early trade was placing contract staff in information technology, and that remains the core of the business. In April 2018 the trade publication Staffing Industry Analysts described Insight Global as the third-largest IT staffing provider in the United States. In July 2026 the company announced that it had been ranked No. 2 on the same publication’s list of the largest IT staffing firms in the US for the fifth year running.

Its working model, as Wikipedia describes it, rests on hiring recent graduates as entry-level recruiters, who find and screen candidates and can be promoted into account-manager roles that look after client companies, and from there into regional leadership. The company says training is central to that model and runs it through an internal programme it calls IG University, which combines one-to-one mentoring, classroom sessions, group discussions and shadowing of senior leaders; it says everyone from the chief executive to new account managers takes part. Bert Bean, who Wikipedia says joined as an entry-level recruiter in 2005, became chief executive in 2018, when Johnson became executive chairman.

A private company with private-equity owners.

Insight Global has been owned by private-equity investors for most of its life. English Wikipedia sets out the chain: a recapitalisation led by H.I.G. Capital in May 2007, when the firm had 14 regional offices; a purchase by Harvest Partners in July 2010; an investment by Ares Management in October 2012, after which the operating company became Insight Global, LLC; and, in April 2016, a deal led by Leonard Green & Partners with Crescent Capital Group and Ardian.

The investors’ own pages give the current picture. Harvest Partners lists the business, under the name IG Staffing Holdings, LLC, as a current investment, with fund investments dated June 2010, October 2012 and October 2019 and exits in October 2012 and October 2019; its dates for 2012 differ from Wikipedia’s account, which has Harvest selling that year rather than also reinvesting. Leonard Green & Partners lists Insight Global as a current investment, made as a recapitalisation. Wikipedia adds that in April 2025 Leonard Green moved its stake into a continuation fund. Insight Global is a private company.

The business has spread well beyond its first offices. Harvest Partners describes it as serving enterprise customers across the US, Canada and the UK, and the company’s website now lists locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Colombia.

The range of work has widened too. Alongside contract staffing, the company’s website lists direct placement, executive search and recruitment process outsourcing, plus consulting in data, cloud, customer experience, application development and data centres, and a separate line of AI consulting and AI engineers. It says it serves industries from accounting and automotive to semiconductors and telecommunications. Wikipedia names two divisions: Evergreen, for managed services and statement-of-work projects, and Insight Global Health, for healthcare staffing. The company now calls itself “an international staffing, consulting, and AI company,” and its home page sums up its offer as “talent, consulting, and AI.”

Staffing and search.

Executive search and staffing firms sell judgement about people, so their public material leans on people too. Spencer Stuart’s website points visitors to a directory where they can find an expert and to a list of global locations, while Egon Zehnder’s invites them to meet its consultants and find its offices. Consultant profiles and office pages, rather than products, carry most of the visual weight, and the photography on them is whatever each firm chooses to publish.

Candidate-facing design is one of the points this guide compares across the category: the job boards and application portals of staffing companies on one side, and on the other the careers pages, alumni network and client log-in that Spencer Stuart lists in its own site menus. Each site is described as the company presents it, without judging how well it works.

Thought leadership supplies much of the category’s printed and digital output. Spencer Stuart says it published its first US Board Index in 1987 and now produces more than 20 Board Indexes a year, and in October 2026 it released a survey of more than 1,400 board chairs, directors and CEOs. Egon Zehnder publishes CEO studies, a podcast and HBR Executive, a partnership with Harvard Business Review. Report covers, chart styles and survey branding therefore do much of the work that packaging does in consumer categories.

Ownership is part of the story, and each firm states it differently. Spencer Stuart says its founder offered his whole shareholding to a group of employees in 1974, and German Wikipedia says Egon Zehnder’s international partners own that firm in equal stakes. For listed staffing groups, investor and stock-listing pages form a further part of the corporate presentation this guide looks at. This guide sets out who founded each firm, who owns it and what it says about itself, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Five Shared Values and an image of light.

Insight Global’s identity is built less on a logo than on a set of written values. Its website lists five Shared Values — “Everyone Matters,” “We Take Care of Each Other,” “Leadership is Here to Serve,” “High Character and Hard Work Above All Else” and “Always Know Where You Stand” — and calls them “the fabric of our company.” It quotes Bean’s statement of purpose: to develop its people “personally, professionally, and financially; so they can be the light to the world around them.” The image of light recurs across the site, which describes the company’s work as “how we light the way.” The values reach into its benefits: the IG Family Foundation, launched in 2020, gives grants to the company’s in-house staff and consultants facing hard times, and the company ties it directly to its second value, “We Take Care of Each Other.”

Its record also has public findings, stated here as their outcomes were reported. In April 2018 Staffing Industry Analysts reported that Insight Global had agreed to pay back wages to 14 employees after a US Department of Labor investigation under federal wage and service-contract rules.

Its address is insightglobal.com, and it is often shortened to IG, both by the company itself, in names such as IG University, and by its investors, in IG Staffing Holdings.

For a design guide, Insight Global shows how a private staffing firm can build its brand around words — values, a purpose statement and a recurring image of light — rather than around a single product. Compare Robert Half, another American staffing name, and AMN Healthcare, the US healthcare staffing group. For this guide we use a deep blue and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Insight Global’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.