Kelly Services, Inc.

What does Kelly Services own?

It owns the Kelly master brand plus specialty units including Kelly Education, Kelly Science Engineering & Technology, Sevenstep, RocketPower, and Motion Recruitment Partners. Its assets are brands, recruiter networks, and the Kelly Helix technology platform rather than physical property.

Is Kelly Services publicly traded?

Yes. It lists on Nasdaq under two tickers: KELYA for voting Class A shares and KELYB for non-voting Class B shares. It has been public since January 1962.

Who founded Kelly Services?

William Russell Kelly, who opened a Detroit service bureau in October 1946. His adopted son Terence Adderley later ran the company for decades as president and chairman.

Where is Kelly Services headquartered?

Troy, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where the company has been based since its early decades.

How many brands does Kelly Services own?

Roughly six market-facing brands across staffing, education, and outsourcing, though many legacy names have been folded into the unified Kelly identity.

Who owns Kelly Services?

Public shareholders. Institutional investors hold most of the equity, and the dual-class structure means voting power sits with Class A holders. No single owner or family controls the company today.

Does Kelly still operate in Europe?

Not as a staffing provider. It sold its European staffing business to Gi Group in January 2024 but continues to serve European clients through global MSP and RPO contracts.

Russell Kelly Office Service opened in Detroit on October 7, 1946, with three employees and $848 in first-year sales. William Russell Kelly's bet was that postwar businesses needed short-term clerical help and that married women seeking flexible work would supply it. Both proved right. Sales topped $1 million by 1953.

The company was renamed Kelly Girl Service in 1957, a brand that turned the staffing concept into a national phenomenon. Licensed branches spread the model across the country through the 1950s, and the company went public in January 1962, trading over the counter.

Kelly Girl Service became Kelly Services, Inc. in 1966, reflecting a workforce that had expanded past secretarial placement into industrial and technical roles. The first international office opened in Toronto in 1968, followed by Paris in 1972 and London in 1973. Sales passed $1 billion in 1986.

William Russell Kelly died in 1994. His adopted son Terence Adderley, who had led the 1962 public offering, ran the company as president and then chairman and CEO until 2006, when Carl Camden took over. Camden's tenure brought a push into outsourcing categories like recruitment process outsourcing and vendor management.

Peter Quigley became CEO in 2019 and began restructuring the company around higher-margin specialties. The program included selling a majority stake in the PersolKelly Asia-Pacific joint venture and, in January 2024, selling the European staffing business to Gi Group Holding for 100 million euros plus an earnout.

The company used the proceeds to buy specialist firms. It acquired Sevenstep in 2019, RocketPower in 2023, Motion Recruitment Partners for $425 million in May 2024, and Children's Therapy Center in November 2024. Chris Layden became president and CEO in November 2023.

Fiscal 2025 brought revenue of approximately $4.3 billion, down 1.9 percent as weakness in federal contractor and large commercial demand offset 3.9 percent growth in Education. Free cash flow rose sixfold to $114 million as management cut costs, and the company guided for a return to organic growth in late 2026.

As a staffing company, Kelly's footprint is defined by the workers it places rather than factories it operates. Its ESG reporting covers workforce diversity, ethics, governance, and the social role of connecting people to employment.

The central ethics questions for any staffing firm involve the placed workforce: pay levels, benefits access, classification of workers, and transparency in the spread between billing rates and wages. Kelly addresses these through supplier codes of conduct and compliance programs, and it has not faced material regulatory findings.

Its education business carries heightened obligations around background screening and student safety, which it handles through dedicated credentialing and compliance teams.

Kelly's public record is comparatively clean for a company of its age. Like all large staffing firms it has faced periodic wage and hour class actions over pay practices, overtime, and worker classification, generally resolved through settlements without material damage.

The broader reputational conversation concerns the industry Kelly created. Labor economists and journalists have examined how temporary staffing, popularized by the Kelly Girl campaigns of the 1950s, enabled a two-tier workforce with fewer benefits and protections than permanent employment. That is a structural critique of the sector rather than a finding against Kelly specifically.