The Kforce Story: 50 Plus Years of Great People Delivering Great Results

Chapter 1

Kforce’s Roots

For the past fifty years, Kforce and its predecessor companies have been in the forefront of the professional staffing industry. In what one Kforce employee referred to as “the most complex, simple business you’ll ever find,” Kforce has mastered the art and science of matching candidates and clients to provide better futures for thousands of candidates seeking positions and an untold number of clients whose businesses depend on capable, qualified employees.

At Kforce, being “in the people business” is not a cliché; it is the entirety of their business. Through their commitment to putting the customer first, they have perfected the art of developing long-term relationships, and in so doing, have created a business that excels at full-circle staffing, turning candidates and consultants into corporate clients and vice versa. Their dedication to the cause of changing people’s lives and the strict moral code within which they fulfill that responsibility have led to their well-deserved success. The Kforce story begins fifty years ago with an organizational ancestry that can be traced to two companies— Source Services Corporation and Romac and Associates. The similarity between their two histories is occasionally uncanny; their differences are minimal. Like two strands of DNA, their stories are intertwined, moving in parallel motion as their industry evolved, eventually coming together to form an entirely new entity.

Source Services Corporation The company that became Source Services Corporation actually began in 1962 as three separate entities: Edp Education Center, Edp Statistical Service, and Edp Personnel. It was the brainchild of Dave Grimes and Bob Trotter, two IBM salesmen located in Chicago who realized that the first thing the customer asked for once they purchased a computer was someone to run it. The computer industry was in its infancy then and there was a shortage of trained operators. As the story goes, their inspiration came to them when one of their customers told them of an uncle who was purportedly “making a bundle” by placing bartenders and cooks in restaurant jobs. “We decided someone should be able to accomplish the same thing in data processing,” Bob wrote.

Romac’s professional exteriors of suits, white shirts, and ties echoed the interior ethics of honesty and integrity.

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