Second Chance Employer Profile
Kelly Services, Inc.
Kelly Services ranks as one of the world’s largest office staffing companies, with $5.4 billion in revenue in 2019. The company has about 1,000 employees at its corporate headquarters in Michigan and about 7,000 employees around the world. It provided jobs to more than 440,000 employees in 2019.
While Kelly originally concentrated on placing temporary clerical workers known as Kelly Girls, today it provides temporary and permanent employees in a wide variety of positions, ranging from office and accounting to industrial and call centers. It also sources talent in technology, engineering, education and government.
Second chance hiring practices
Kelly’s second chance hiring all began with a seven-year partnership with Toyota Manufacturing of Kentucky to help staff its facility in Georgetown. Working together, the two companies offered opportunities to job seekers with nonviolent misdemeanors and felonies that were unrelated to their job responsibilities. Among the 156 workers from this population who were hired, not a single one was terminated for behavior that correlated to their conviction.
Based on its success with Toyota, Kelly Services launched Kelly 33 in the fall of 2021 as part of its Equity@Work initiative. The name represents the 33% of American adults who have a criminal record. And the program has become the company’s hiring practices mindset. Staff members assess each individual job applicant – both for temporary and permanent positions – and what they were charged with. If the charge is not related to the job, they are allowed to work.
In addition, Kelly’s account executives speak with the companies they handle to determine their hiring practices and encourage them to change their policies about hiring people with previous justice involvement.
Kelly Service’s efforts could have wide-reaching impact, because the company and its competitors interact with nearly all the major employers around the world.