The main difference is who owns the work and the outcome.

With direct hire, you add a permanent employee to your team. Kelly supports the search and placement, and the individual becomes your employee.

With contract staffing, Kelly provides specialized talent who work under your direction and within your existing plans, processes, and day-to-day management. You retain ownership of the work and deliverables.

With a project or program solution, Kelly takes on a defined scope of work or ongoing area of responsibility, manages the team delivering it, and is accountable for agreed deliverables, milestones, and outcomes.

Many infrastructure programs use more than one model. You might use contract talent during a build phase, a defined project solution for a specific work package, and direct hire for the roles that remain once the site or program is operational.

Use technical project services when the work can be clearly defined around a specific scope, deliverable, milestone, or outcome, and you want Kelly to take greater responsibility for managing the work. It is well suited for discrete, bounded packages - a commissioning campaign, a cabling fit-out, a circuit migration, a lab test program - where the outcome is measurable and the method can be left to the supplier.

Contract staffing is a better fit when you need additional capacity or specialized expertise integrated into your existing team, with your organization directing the work day to day. A simple way to think about it: if you need people to support the work, contract staffing may be the better fit. If you need a defined piece of work delivered, technical project services may be the better solution.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) gives you dedicated recruiting capability across all or part of your hiring process, rather than engaging a staffing partner one role at a time. Through KellyOCG, RPO can support sourcing, screening, hiring coordination, technology, reporting, and other parts of the recruitment process based on your needs.

RPO can be a strong fit when you’re hiring at scale, recruiting for similar roles across multiple locations, or need consistent recruiting support over an extended period. It gives you a more integrated approach to managing hiring demand, candidate experience, process consistency, and visibility across the program.

For more targeted or immediate needs, contingent staffing or direct hire may be the better fit. For larger, ongoing hiring programs, RPO gives you the infrastructure and recruiting capacity to operate at scale.

What is direct hire, and how is it different from temp-to-hire?

Direct hire is a permanent placement from the start. Kelly Digital Infrastructure helps you identify and evaluate qualified professionals for long-term roles across data centers, telecommunications, AI and automation, power and energy, and other critical infrastructure environments. Once hired, the individual joins your organization as a permanent employee. The recruitment fee is typically based on a percentage of first-year salary.

Temp-to-hire begins as a contract engagement, with the option to convert the individual to permanent employment after an agreed period. In many cases, contract professionals can also transition into permanent roles if the need becomes long term and both sides decide the fit is right.

Direct hire is typically the better fit when you are building permanent technical or leadership capability, especially for specialized engineering, operations, program, or leadership roles where you want to compete for long-term talent from the outset. Temp-to-hire offers more flexibility when you want to assess fit on the job or when the long-term structure of the role is still evolving.

Yes. In many infrastructure programs, using more than one solution is the norm rather than the exception.

A data center build might use Technical Project Services for a defined commissioning campaign, contract engineers staffing to add technical capacity during construction, and direct hire for permanent operations roles once the facility is live. A network rollout might combine contract field teams with RPO to support higher-volume hiring.

Because these solutions can support different phases of the same program, the mix can evolve as your needs change without requiring you to change partners.