In 1990, in an office in Chicago, Ellen Dettling had a phone and a filing cabinet and a belief so plain it almost sounds like a bumper sticker.
The right person in the right role changes everything.
That's it. That was the whole thesis of City Staffing. Not a market disruption, not a five-year exit plan. Just a woman who had watched what happens when the wrong person gets planted in the wrong seat — the slow leak of it, the way it drains a whole team — and decided she could do better matchmaking than that.
So she started. She built a women-owned firm and got it WBE-certified when that certification meant explaining, over and over, to rooms that weren't sure what to do with you, that a woman running a staffing company in Chicago wasn't a novelty item. It was a business. A serious one.
Here's the thing about staffing that Ellen understood early. You are never really selling a resume. You're selling a fit — the human kind, the kind you can feel in the first ten minutes of a Tuesday when a new hire either belongs in that room or doesn't. That's not a spreadsheet skill. That's a listening skill. And Ellen built a company that listens for a living.
Now do the math on thirty-five years of that.
This year City Staffing is earning its 13th consecutive ClearlyRated Best of Staffing award — thirteen years in a row of clients and candidates being asked, honestly, would you recommend these people, and answering yes. Add the 14th talent award. Then add something brand new: its first-ever nods from both Forbes and Inc. as a Best Workplace, arriving in the same breath.
Thirteen years of clients saying yes. And now, in the same season, the people who work there saying yes too.
I want to sit with that for a second, because it's the quiet proof of the whole idea. You cannot fake a culture award and a client-loyalty award at the same time. One measures how you treat the people you serve. The other measures how you treat the people who serve alongside you. When both land together, it means there was never a seam between the two. The way City Staffing treats a candidate and the way it treats its own is the same way — because Ellen never built two companies, an inside one and an outside one. She built one.
That's what culture-first actually means, stripped of the buzzword. It means the belief you started with in 1990 is still doing the work in 2026, only now it compounds. A reputation earned one good placement at a time doesn't spike. It accrues. Like interest. Quietly, and then all at once, thirty-five years later, in a stack of awards that arrive together.
Ellen wasn't chasing a trophy shelf. She was chasing the right person in the right role, one match at a time, for three and a half decades.
The trophies just caught up to her.
The awards are new this year. The reason for them isn't. Somewhere in Chicago there's a woman who still believes *the right person in the right room changes everything* — and she's still proving it.
