A Leader in the Staffing Industry Gets a New Take on What Talent Management Can Do for Business Strategy

Challenge

As the founder of the temporary staffing industry in 1946, Kelly Services has continued to be an industry leader with growth in the United States and across the globe. The organization employs a corporate staff of 7,000. Kelly provides temporary employment to more than 750,000 workers in 37 countries and territories worldwide.

When Carl Camden was named CEO in 2006, one of his first priorities was to gain a deeper understanding of the organization’s overall talent management and succession planning systems. What began as an initial review of the C-suite soon cascaded into a broad talent management and succession planning process.

Solution

Kelly Services hired Personnel Decisions International (PDI), a global leader in leadership consulting that serves 80 of the Fortune 100 and 75 of the Global 100, to conduct verbal 360 reviews with four of the organization’s top executives. PDI executive consultants conducted extensive one-on-one interviews to gain a broad and in-depth understanding of the organization’s senior executives’ strengths, potential, and development needs.

“It was through PDI’s comprehensive findings that we uncovered opportunities to significantly bolster talent management across the enterprise,” said Mike Lechner, Kelly Service’s VP of Global Talent Management and Leadership Development.

Intrigued by PDI’s findings, Kelly Services decided to dig deeper.

“We learned a tremendous amount through PDI’s process of working with our senior leaders. It became clear that we needed a stronger strategy for our talent, better bench strength, and a more cohesive global approach to making sure our talent systems were connected to our business objectives,” Lechner said. After completing the senior executive review, PDI did a roll-up on the organizational talent issues.

“Talent as strategy is just now being talked about in the industry—it’s cutting edge, and many companies are trying to determine where to start and what that means for their organization,” Lechner said. Kelly decided to focus first on ensuring that their top 300 leaders have development plans, combined with improving the data they use for succession planning. Initially, they began assessing 55 of the top management in the Americas and Global Sales. They chose PDI’s TalentView® solutions as a cost-effective way to gather the data needed to give the organization a measure of bench strength and to provide individuals with input for their development. TalentView is a set of stateof-the-art online assessment tools that allow organizations to accurately gauge potential and performance in leaders. It evaluates skills, competencies, experience, and personality and provides feedback on those that are most relevant to advancement to senior leadership levels. Each executive discussed the results and their implications with a senior Kelly HR partner and was given responsibility for scheduling a development planning meeting with their manager to present their objectives and actions. “PDI does a nice job of pulling all this information together and displaying scores based on Kelly’s competency model,” Lechner said. “TalentView is a fundamental platform for collecting the data we need on our talent. The group data output is very powerful and the individual reports are great for crafting development plans. It’s definitely having the impact we wanted.”

The initial assessment led to full development assessments and planning for regional managers, which in turn led to better succession management. Throughout the process, Kelly realized that their leaders would benefit from more training in how to coach others. They chose PDI’s Leader As Coach training to help facilitate that goal.

They continue their assessment and development work with PDI in their EMEA and APAC regions.

Result

“The work we are doing with PDI is facilitating broad cultural change in our company. Before, people shied away from feedback on their performance and there was no clear follow-up to development plans. Now the process is very transparent—your boss discusses it with you and with your HR business partner. There are development plans in place and clear expectations of accountability,” Lechner said.

“We needed to get to know our talent better. In the past, we were not very transparent about our succession planning. Now, that has changed. People are open to talking about performance, potential, and key development issues,” Lechner said.

“We are definitely reaping the benefits of the whole process. We are beginning to really get a sense of our talent needs, who is ready to move up, and who needs more development. This kind of focused development is tied to our business strategy. We believe there is a correlation to our top and bottom line,” Lechner said.

“PDI is not seen as just a vendor to us anymore, they are a real partner in our talent process.”