Kelly Services Review
Kelly Services Review Summary
Score 8.5 out of 10
Currency
20+
Monthly fees
Not disclosed
Payment options
ACH and SWIFT/Wire Transfer
Kelly Services is a long established recruitment and staffing agency, committed to talent solutions for client companies of all sizes. Read my honest review of their recruitment solutions.
Key Takeaways
- Kelly Services is one of the world’s largest recruitment and temporary staffing firms.
- This agency specializes in recruiting and staffing for 12 different industries and works in 22 countries around the world.
- The agency provides recruitment process outsourcing, payroll, and other workforce-related services.
Kelly Services Company Overview
Kelly Services has a long history. Founded in Detroit in 1946, it was originally an offsite office service outsourcing provider. However, it soon started providing temporary onsite office support in the form of working women who were nicknamed ‘Kelly Girls.’ This now outdated term became synonymous with office temps of all kinds and helped put Kelly on the map.
Over 75 years later, Kelly Services is one of the largest providers of recruitment, temporary staffing, and other HR services in the world. This agency is divided into various brands that focus on geographical regions and specific service provisions. In January 2024, Kelly Services sold off its European staffing business to become more streamlined and focused. It continues to offer recruitment and temporary staffing through Kely USA, Kelly Canada, Kelly Mexico, and Kelly Puerto Rico. It also continues to maintain its outsourcing services in 22 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australasia.
Kelly Services is now known for providing a wide range of services, including RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) and payroll. It has been recognized by Forbes as the 2nd best recruiter in America for professional jobs with salaries under $100,000 though it also performs executive searches under retainer. In this review, we’ll look at how Kelly Services is set up, the range it services it offers, and whether this provider is the right choice for your organization to partner with.
How Kelly Services Works
Kelly Services is divided into several smaller brands that handle countries (Kelly USA, Kelly Canada) and also industries (Kelly Education, Kelly Telecom). The aims of these business units are the same, however. They’re organized to provide recruitment and staffing solutions as well as HR function outsourcing for their clients no matter where they are in the world.
Permanent Positions
As a recruiter, Kelly Services works with clients to find them the skilled talent they want to hire directly as permanent employees. It begins by closely consulting with the client to find out precisely what they need in terms of roles and numbers of workers. It also needs to find out the specific skills and qualifications that successful candidates will need to possess. Finally, it will try to learn as much as possible about the remuneration you can offer, your benefits and retirement plans, and your company culture and environment to best represent you as a recruiter.
With this information on board, Kelly Services begins the recruitment process by searching for appropriate candidates in its talent pool or externally if necessary. Recruiters screen applicants and put only the most compatible and desirable people forward as candidates. From there, it’s up to your organization to reject candidates or approve them to move on to the interview stage. Once you’ve interviewed people, you’ll make your selections, and Kelly Services will help you send them offers and get them onboard. After they’ve signed contracts with you, they’re considered hired, and Kelly Services will invoice you for recruiting them.
RPO
At times, an organization’s hiring needs may not square with its HR resources and recruitment abilities. Startups and other small businesses may not even have HR professionals at all to help them with hiring and managing staff. Larger organizations may find themselves having to scale rapidly to meet business demands. They may suddenly need hundreds or even thousands of new workers but lack the capacity to hire them in time. This is when Kelly Service’s RPO service becomes an effective option.
Through this service, Kelly Services can take over some or all parts of the recruitment process for its clients. With an end-to-end RPO service, it will source, screen, interview, select, onboard, and train the people it assesses as the best match for your needs. These employees can be hired permanently or on a project basis.
Executive Search
Kelly Services provides limited executive search services through some of its different country offices. It also owns a brand called Greenwood Asher & Associates which performs executive searches specifically for the education industry. These search services involve hiring the provider on an agreed retainer amount and then paying it a percentage of the executive’s salary upon completion of a successful recruitment.
Kelly Services Features
Kelly Services is primarily a recruitment and temporary staffing service provider but also provides consultation and outsourcing for different HR functions. Its key features include.
1. Professional Sector Focus
Few firms would reject any recruitment engagement because of the job or industry it’s in. At the same time, most recruiters have their specialties in certain industries or professional levels. Kelly Services has extensive experience recruiting in the following industries in specific:
- Accounting and finance
- Administrative and office
- Contact center
- Education
- Engineering
- Government
- Manufacturing and production
- Science and clinical
- Semiconductor
- Technology
- Telecom
- Warehouse and distribution
Kelly Services also handles executive searches for CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, as well as other high-level positions in the banking, finance, financial services, accounting, project management, and education industries.
2. Temporary Staffing Servicest
In addition to roughly 8000 full-time employees that work directly for Kelly Services, this firm also employs over 450,000 temporary workers every year. These workers can be provided at a moment’s notice, though clients can also book staff in advance by taking out contracts with Kelly Services for the workers they know they’ll require. As with permanent positions, recruiters look for workers who will best match each organization’s needs and requirements.
All of Kelly Services’ temporary workers are vetted to ensure their skills, qualifications, and employment experience. This helps to ensure that clients receive the workers they truly need to produce value for their organizations. While these workers work temporarily for you, they’re technically employed by Kelly Services. This means that you set their schedules and monitor their work, but Kelly Services handles their payroll, taxes, and benefits. This also leaves the door open to the possibility of hiring people as permanent employees later if they work out and match well with your organization.
Kelly Services also provides a service called Skilled Professional Solutions, which essentially involves the temporary staffing of professional workers. If you have specific projects that require professional expertise or if key employees have to take extended leave, they can be replaced by experts in their fields. This gives you consultancy-like support without the expense of a long-term commitment. Kelly Services technically employs these professionals and manages their payroll and benefits. They can also be hired permanently at a later date if they end up fitting well within your organization.
3. Global Reach
Kelly Services has over 8000 employees working in 22 countries across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australasia. Previous to 2024, it employed over 17,000 people, but this year, it sold its European staffing business and greatly reduced its workforce. The agency still provides other services in European countries, such as consulting, recruiting, and outsourcing. It will handle local and national recruiting in these 22 countries and can also connect clients with international workers they may wish to hire. However, it doesn’t offer EOR or Employer of Record services for companies that want to hire staff in other countries.
4. Other Services
In addition to recruitment and temp staffing, Kelly Services has an extensive offering of other services that relate to workers and their management. It provides RPO services and even does onsite workforce management, essentially acting as an in-house HR department for its clients’ workers. It performs business process outsourcing (BPO) for its clients, helping them with many aspects of their administration and legal services.
As a payroll provider, Kelly Services can manage your staffing expenses, including benefits administration, tax withholding, and reporting. It was also the very first MSP or managed services program provider ever and continues to provide full staffing solutions and team management for its clients. Finally, through the Kelly Certification Institute, Kelly helps workers increase their skills and gain qualifications that make them more hirable.
5. Platform
Most of Kelly Services’ main services, like temporary staffing and permanent placements, are handled through its website. Clients can fill out contact forms and then tend to communicate and manage services through phone, email, and live chat channels. Likewise, job seekers can post their resumes and apply for positions through the website. However, Kelly Services now offers a more convenient way to manage applications through its mobile app for iOS and Android called Kelly Now. This app lets job seekers browse jobs, apply, and manage their schedules and timesheets if they’re hired as temporary workers.
Kelly Services, through its brand Kelly OCG, now offers a workforce management platform called Helix. This cloud-based platform allows employers to manage their external teams, integrate with their current management and payroll tools, and collect data about their workforces.
6. Resources
For a very large company, Kelly Services has very little in the way of resources for its clients and job seekers. It only offers an up-to-date blog and releases reports and papers about hiring and recruitment-related issues to help inform clients and job seekers.
Kelly Services Pricing
Kelly Services has selected to keep its cards close to its chest and, like most of its competitors, not to reveal its pricing structure for any of its multitude of services online. While it argues that pricing is quite difficult and must take into account multiple factors, it could easily post basic starting prices for the ease of its potential clients. Instead, they’re required to fill out contact forms to start conversations that will result in tailored quotes.
Like most recruiters, Kelly Services will charge either a flat fee or a percentage of a worker’s first-year salary for recruitment. For executive searches, this percentage is typically 30-35%. For temporary workers, it will charge a markup on daily wages – the industry averages between 40% and 60%. However, our research has not turned up any reliable information about pricing for this service provider.
Kelly Services Reviews
The average scores (as of the time of writing) were:
- Kelly Services Glassdoor = 3.4/5 (6,574 reviews)
- Kelly Services G2 = 4.4/5 (4 reviews)
- Kelly Services Indeed = 3.8/5 (20,279 reviews)
Kelly Services Pros and Cons
As a temporary staffing, recruitment, and outsourcing service provider, Kelly Services has its specific strengths and weaknesses. These include:
- Pros
Targeted industries
If you work in one of the 12 industries that Kelly Services specializes in, you should be able to have your vacancies filled quickly and with well-selected workers.
Extensive global reach
Kelly Services has offices in 22 countries scattered around the world and provides recruitment, consulting, and outsourcing services for local businesses. These offices can also coordinate to help businesses recruit employees internationally.
Digital platforms
Kelly Services provides the Kelly Now app to help job seekers post their resumes, apply for jobs, and track communications from their mobile devices. It also has the Helix platform which is an effective, AI-powered workforce management system.
Managed services
Different organizations can choose from regular recruitment and temporary staffing, RPO, BPO, and MSP programs depending on their hiring needs. This provider also manages payroll and even workforce management as required.
- Cons
No prices online
Kelly Services doesn’t provide any prices or fee structures online. Instead, it asks potential clients to contact the agency for tailored quotes. This can make it difficult and time-consuming to compare this provider with others offering similar services
No European staffing
In January 2024, Kelly Services divested itself of its European staffing service and no longer offers temporary employment opportunities in this region.
Kelly Services Unique Selling Point
Kelly Services’ unique selling point is the multiple levels of services that it offers to its clients of different sizes and capacities. They can choose managed or partly managed services or simply go with normal recruiting for permanent and temporary workers as their budgets and human resources allow.
Kelly Services is also known for their commitment to diversity and inclusion, and for this reason we rated them one of the best international recruitment agencies.
RemotePeople Score for Kelly Services
7.5/10
Our expert score for Kelly Services
Our team came to this score by considering the following components in the following weightings:
Talent Acquisition features
25%
RPO features
10%
HR features
10%
Compliance features
10%
Platform features
10%
Pricing
20%
User reviews
15%
For each component, Kelly Services received the following score:
Talent Acquisition features
20/25
RPO features
7/10
HR features
8/10
Compliance features
8/10
Platform features
7/10
Pricing
14/20
User reviews
13/15
Overall Assessment: Kelly Services
With multiple solutions possible, organizations of all sizes can work with Kelly Services to find the precise services they need for permanent and temporary staffing. They will all benefit from the agency’s huge talent pool and global connections.
For an alternative recruitment option for full international coverage, consider Remote People’s recruitment and executive search solutions.
Read more about the best recruitment firms
Our Solutions
- EOR from $199
- Employee Benefits
- Global Payroll
- International Recruitment
- Contractor Management
- Company Incorporation