Interaction snaps up 31 Kelly Services branches

18-Mar-2009 | By DeeDee Doke

Multi-sector UK recruiter Interaction has seen its ninebranch network more than quadruple in size this week with the acquisition of 31 branches from Kelly Services.

Speaking exclusively to Recruiter, Interaction managing director Andrew Gilchrist said that Kelly’s announcement in January of its UK restructuring (recruiter. co.uk, 29 January) convinced him to get in touch with the global staffing company. “This was a prime opportunity,” he said. “Interaction is very good at being a local business, but this makes us national. Now is the time to go and open up, and seize the moment.”

The 31 branches acquired from Kelly, which extend as far as Bolton and York to the North and Plymouth and Worthing to the South, will be called Kelly Interaction. Gilchrist said he planned to bolster the 150-staff workforce
acquired from Kelly by “two to three” people in each office to roll out different specialisms across the predominantly
commercialfocused offices. “Our opportunity is to consolidate and get commercial really buzzing. Then we can roll
out, say, engineering right away. We’re looking for great recruitment talent.”

Recruiter.co.uk first revealed the deal last Friday. Tracy Ellison, interim managing director for Kelly Services in the UK, told Recruiter last week that she was delighted to confirm the sale because it saved jobs. “As part of our reorganisation, we had originally anticipated that we would have to close a number of branch locations. We were expecting a considerable number of redundancies,”she said.

As a result, Ellison said, the company had done “a lot of work behind the scenes” to prepare employees who had been facing redundancy for their job searches, and had worked closely with other recruiters with hopes of securing them new jobs. “It’s a great testament to the fact that we pulled together as an industry,” she said.

Kelly is focusing its presence in major UK cities on four ‘pillars’: commercial/ light industrial, professional/ technical, on-site and outsourced consulting.

Both Gilchrist and Kelly Services declined to reveal the deal’s terms. However, a corporate finance expert suggested that if the branchesinvolved were losing money, it would not be unusual in such a situation for the vendor “to pay the buyer to take the problem away. That amount would tend to be linked to the closure costs the vendor would incur. That way, the vendor would avoid negative PR from branches closing and
redundancies”.