How to Hire the Best Temporary Staff

When you need temporary workers you want to hire the best temporary staff available: Those with the right skills, drive, and attitude who will add value to your bottom line. As more organizations move towards a model of treating human resources – including temporary resources – as an asset rather than an expense, the competition for the best workers is increasing. Through the right temp agency, you can access the help you need to find, screen, and hire the best temporary staff for your organization.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: It Starts with Your Temp Agency

Every organization is different, including yours. Every temp agency is also different; some agencies may specialize in very narrow industry niches, while others are broad and established enough to specialize in several industries. As a hiring manger, it can be difficult to determine which type of agency is the right one to use to hire the best temp staff for your particular industry. There are, however, several advantages to choosing an agency with specialties in several areas:

  • A multi-specialty temp agency is more likely to be able to meet your current demands as well as future demands
  • A multi-specialty temp agency is likely to have a greater number of qualified temporary workers in its databases
  • A multi-specialty temp agency has deeper resources in the staffing industry to help you hire the best temp staff whenever and wherever need arises

These factors can save you from hiring temps through multiple channels, which can escalate into a confusing, and costly, endeavor when your organization is working on a tight schedule, detracting from your ability to focus on the drive to hire the best temp staff. A multi-specialty temp agency can also save you time through streamlined candidate screening, since an agency accustomed to working in multiple areas will already be familiar with best practices in hiring wherever your need may be.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: Thorough Screening Ensures Quality Candidates

All too many organizations shorten the candidate screening process when hiring temp staff. Although the temporary nature of these assignments makes it tempting to try to save expenses through reduced screening, organizations that follow this practice are usually putting themselves at a disadvantage. Several benefits of temp staffing, including the ability to move to permanent hiring based on a temp’s performance, are diminished or erased when screening is skipped.

Especially for longer assignments, your organization needs to know the skills and attributes of those on temporary payroll. Experienced temp agencies make it easy for you to screen candidates for quality by putting a range of technological and more traditional screening tools at your disposal, ensuring that you hire the best temp staff possible. Make sure that your agency screens its candidates before recommending them for your open assignments, and perform your own secondary screening whenever possible.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: Adopt a Long Term View

Temp agencies are of enormous benefit when your organization needs workers at the last minute for assignments of short duration. Still, last minute changes and rushed temporary hiring can be taxing and reduce your chances of recruiting top quality candidates. What if you could project when and where such help was likely to be needed and plan accordingly? An established temp agency will have the experience needed to partner with your organization to create a long term hiring plan that addresses your needs for temp staff and can make the best temp staff on its roster available to you during your rush times through such prior planning.

The competition to hire the best temp staff is not expected to slow anytime soon. Make sure that your organization is prepared and in a position to hire the best available candidates by working with your temp agency to address your organization’s temporary hiring needs. With a comprehensive temporary hiring strategy you can add value to your organization while saving costs, a winning approach.

How Staffing Agencies Can Save you Time and Money

There are a number of ways that staffing agencies can assist you in hiring the right talent for every job opening, but essentially they act as an extension of your existing human resources department. If your HR department consists of only you, the owner, then outsourcing some of your hiring practices can be a tremendous boost to both your productivity and your sanity.

Certain HR decisions, like hiring, can be overwhelming and often bring no immediate monetary return to your company. And hiring the wrong person can have a lasting impact on company morale, productivity and the bottom line. Here just a few ways staffing agencies can take the headache out of hiring.

Easier to Find Employees with Specific Talent

While you probably know your industry very well, you may be hopeless when it comes to understanding some of the niche roles in your company. If you’re not a writer or a designer, you may not know how to attract the right marketing professional to your team. If you’re looking to launch an annual fundraiser, you’ll need an event planner who can help realize your vision. Staffing agencies can help you identify and contact talented individuals you might not know how to find. They can help you assess employees, check their references and identify candidates who will fit your needs.

Reduce the Cost of New Hire, Bad Hires

Hiring any employee is a large investment of time, effort and resources to post a job, screen applicants, interview and then train a new employee. Staffing agencies take that cost out of your hand when you contract their services. Yes, it requires a relatively hefty fee to actually work with the recruiting company, but think about it in long term.

Additionally, using a staffing agency can drastically reduce your chances of making the wrong hire. The Department of Labor estimates the cost of replacing a employee to be one-third of their salary. However, hiring the wrong employee and fixing the mistake within 6 months can cost as much as 2.5 times the person’s salary. Even at $40,000 a year, that is a $120,000 mistake, including their salary.  Isn’t that worth the cost of doing it right the first time?

A Motivated Job Search

Let’s face it: there are a number of tasks that you would prefer to do instead of combing through resumes and applications for the right hire. Many small business owners will drag out the process, costing themselves more money as they struggle by without the proper staff.  Since you’re paying them to find the right employees, a staffing firm will not suffer from a lack of motivation. And since they can only compete on their reputations, these agencies have become skilled at weeding out potential job candidates who are not properly motivated or lack the skills necessary for a specific job. Since they are working for you, not a jobseeker, a recruitment agency will work to assess potential employees to make sure they’re a perfect fit. This will help you cut down the risk of a bad hire, while also minimizing the time and effort spent identifying quality candidates.

Top Five Advantages Of Using A Temp Staffing Agency

Today’s internet-driven, split-second business environments demand organizations be: v  Nimble v  Efficient v Strategic. 

All while living up to the mantra of “faster, better, cheaper”, with stakeholders all expecting more to be done with less. Juggling these demands puts enormous pressure on a company’s ability to effectively staff to meet dynamically changing needs. The best-laid staffing plans can quickly go awry with an unanticipated big new project or a sudden surge in business.

Many organizations rely on temporary workers to help smooth out the peaks and valleys in constantly fluctuating staffing needs. Temporary employees can not only help with a wide variety of operational and business tasks, companies are also attracted to partnering with proven temporary staffing agencies for numerous other benefits. Read more about Temp Staffing Agency