Workforce strategy separates market leaders from companies stuck in a cycle of turnover, safety incidents, and productivity loss. Kelly VP Krysten Duffy—with 28 years of experience turning around struggling client sites—shares six principles that move organizations from transactional staffing to strategic workforce solutions, including why talent should be treated as an investment (not a line item to cut) and when your workforce partner deserves a seat at the planning table.
Kelly is a global workforce solutions company that helps clients move beyond filling seats to building workforces that drive business outcomes. This approach has delivered results like eliminating workers' comp incidents within six months at a high-turnover manufacturing site and expanding a simple staffing engagement into a five-year BPO partnership managing non-core operations.
A few years back, a client asked us to help turn around a site that was drowning in turnover. Their existing setup—a vendor-neutral arrangement with multiple staffing providers competing to fill orders fastest—had created a revolving door of workers who didn't stick. Training coordinators couldn't keep up with the constant rotation of new hires. Workers' comp claims were elevated because people were getting hurt during that steep learning curve that comes with being new on the job.
We asked for 90 days to do things differently. We spent the first 30 days meeting with hiring managers, understanding what made their top performers successful, and building a recruiting strategy around those insights. The customer agreed that for this trial period, speed wasn't the priority. We'd focus on quality.
In less than 90 days, turnover dropped dramatically. Within six months, workers' comp incidents went to zero. The training team could finally breathe. And the business impact showed up in productivity, in morale, and in their bottom line.
This is just one example of how workforce solutions should support business growth, not just fill open seats. And too many companies are still treating talent like a commodity instead of the foundation of everything they're trying to build.
But what does it actually look like to use your workforce strategically? Here we take a closer look at six principles that separate companies who get this right from those stuck in the transactional mindset—from rethinking how you budget for talent, to knowing when your workforce partner should have a seat at the planning table, to recognizing when the solution you need might be bigger than staffing alone.
When budgets get tight, labor costs are often the first thing executives look to trim. Economic pressures are real, and sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. But talent shouldn't always be the first place you target for savings—because talent is the foundation from which teams achieve their goals, adapt to changing demands, and maintain a competitive edge.
McKinsey's 2025 analysis of over 1,400 companies found that most organizations spend three times more on talent than on capital assets each year—yet few apply the same rigor to measuring return on investment in human capital as they do for equipment or technology. The companies that outperformed peers in both revenue per employee and shareholder returns were those that focused on maximizing the value their people create, even during challenging periods.
McKinsey also quantified what under-investing in talent actually costs: for U.S. manufacturers, issues like turnover, absenteeism, vacancies, and low engagement create an economic drag of $17,000 to $30,000 per active employee per year. For a mid-sized company with 10,000 employees, that could mean roughly $250 million in annual profit leakage. Cutting labor spend doesn't eliminate these costs; it often makes them worse by triggering more attrition and widening skill gaps.
There's a fundamental difference between a staffing vendor and a workforce solutions partner, and it comes down to this: one fills orders, the other understands your business to help you achieve set outcomes.
In a transactional staffing relationship, the goal is speed: get people in seats, fill the order, move on to the next one. There's no time to understand the company's culture, what success looks like in a given role, or what the business is actually trying to achieve.
A strategic workforce partner becomes ingrained in the customer's culture. At Kelly, we gear our recruiting plans toward a client’s specific goals and what their leaders are being held accountable for. Beyond sourcing candidates, our recruiters collaborate with operational teams to find targeted skill sets that will have a quicker start with less learning curve, lower turnover, and faster business impact.
Deloitte research found that 70% of businesses reported a strategic workforce partner improved their access to high-quality candidates in hard-to-fill positions. Specialized partners bring industry-specific expertise, market intelligence, and talent networks that internal recruiting teams often can't match on their own.
One of the clearest signals that a company is serious about using their workforce as a growth lever is whether they're willing to involve us early in planning conversations. When clients share their forecasts, their growth plans, their five-year roadmap—and let us come to the table with labor market trends, industry insights, and data—we can actually help them model what success looks like.
Too often, companies bring in staffing partners after they've built out their entire plan and now need someone to execute on it. We can't influence hiring decisions or help them think through whether they need temporary workers, freelance talent, direct hires, or some combination. The opportunity to contribute strategically has already passed.
A C-suite study found that 36% of executives feel skill gaps are limiting their ability to pursue growth opportunities, and 23% report project delays due to insufficient talent. Engaging a workforce partner early helps prevent these bottlenecks by making sure the right people are in place at the right time.
When companies treat hiring as a reactive, transactional process, the consequences go beyond just filling roles slowly or poorly. Quality suffers, and not just in the talent you bring in, but in the output they produce. Turnover climbs. Training costs spike because you're constantly onboarding new people. And here's something that doesn't get discussed enough: safety culture takes a hit.
Working with clients in oil and gas and heavy manufacturing, I've seen how rushing the hiring process can increase safety risks. When someone is placed in a role involving large machinery without proper vetting for the right skills and experience, even a small misstep can lead to costly and dangerous consequences.
Additionally, a Travelers Injury Impact Report analyzing over 1.5 million workers' compensation claims found that 35% of injuries occurred during the employee's first year on the job, regardless of age or prior industry experience. A separate study from the Workers Compensation Research Institute found that more than half of all injuries happened within a worker's first two years. When you're constantly cycling through new hires because you prioritized speed over fit, you're putting people in that high-risk window over and over again.
According to McKinsey, organizations that leverage data and analytics for workforce planning are 1.5 times more likely to outperform their peers in profitability and growth. But most companies aren't measuring their workforce investments with anywhere near the rigor they apply to other business functions.
If you want to know whether your workforce strategy is actually supporting growth, you need to track specific metrics and understand what they're telling you. Here are the ones that matter most:
Conversion rate. This measures how many temporary or contract workers get hired into permanent roles. When clients are hiring the people we place, it tells us we're aligned with their organizational goals and values, and that we truly understand the skill sets they need.
Time-to-fill. This is how long it takes to fill an open position from the moment it's posted. When those numbers start dragging out, it usually points to something: maybe the sourcing strategy isn't working, the job requirements aren't realistic, or the pay isn't competitive with the market. And every day a role sits open costs money in overtime, delayed projects, and lost productivity.
First-year turnover rate. This tells you how many new hires leave within their first 12 months. When that number is high, it's expensive—and it usually means something went wrong in the hiring process, whether that's a poor fit, weak onboarding, or a gap between what candidates expected and what they actually experienced on the job.
Retention rate by tenure. Beyond first-year turnover, it helps to track retention at different milestones—90 days, one year, three years. That way you can see where people are dropping off and start asking why. If they're leaving at 90 days, it's probably an onboarding or job-fit issue. If they're leaving at three years, it might be that they don't see a path forward.
Quality of hire. This one's harder to put a number on, but it matters. It usually combines things like performance ratings, how quickly someone gets up to speed, and whether managers are satisfied with the hire. A workforce partner who consistently delivers high-quality people is one who really understands what success looks like inside your organization.
One more signal that's harder to measure but worth paying attention to: when someone your workforce partner placed years ago rises into a leadership role and becomes the person deciding to use that same partner for their own team's hiring needs. That kind of long-term relationship is built on trust and it doesn't happen when you're just filling seats.
A few years ago, I was doing a site visit with a client who just needed staffing support. During our conversation, the site leader mentioned they were struggling with their MRO facility (the area where they manage internal inventory like parts and tools). He described it as a mess. Items going in and out with no tracking, things disappearing, nobody had control of it.
He wasn't expecting us to have a solution—it was just a side note. But I started talking to him about business process outsourcing (BPO), where we manage a specific function that isn't core to the business but is draining time and resources. They were growing so fast they couldn't focus on it internally.
It turned out to be one of the fastest sales I've ever made. We implemented a BPO solution, and the efficiency gains and cost savings were significant. Five years later, that engagement has grown in scope. They've asked us to take on additional functions that weren't core to the site, and we're still managing it for them today.
A workforce partner who truly understands your business can spot opportunities to help that go beyond the original ask.
If I could give one piece of advice to business leaders who haven't thought strategically about their workforce, it would be this: people are the heart of every organization. That's the foundation of any successful business.
No matter what kind of business planning you're doing, whether it's next year's strategic plan or an expansion into a new market, the people component should come first. Who's going to execute this? What skills do they need? How do we find and keep them? Getting those answers right sets the stage for everything that follows.
Cutting corners on talent almost always leads to the same place: productivity drops, innovation stalls, and turnover climbs. Companies that invest in talent and work with partners who understand their business see the opposite. They innovate faster, get to market sooner, and drive stronger sales.
In a world where skills and knowledge fuel competitive advantage, leading with talent means leading your market.