Many employers tend to overlook a critical aspect when hiring temp staff:  Temporary employees are as important as permanent employees. That’s because temp employees usually perform the same tasks as permanent staff, including interacting with clients, accessing data bases, ordering and receiving merchandise, and so on. If you consider all these, you can easily understand that hiring the wrong temp staff may cost you not only money, but also your company’s reputation.

The Real Cost of Bad Hiring

Unfortunately, hiring staff isn’t an exact science. Numerous recruits who are impressive on paper and in interviews, end up being in conflict with the expectations and values of the organizations that hire them. This can result in procedural breakdown, reputational damage, and significant financial losses. Understanding how a “bad apple” can affect your operations and bottom line should persuade you to ponder everything carefully when hiring temp staff.

 

• Training: Before looking for temp staff, make sure you check how much training the position requires. If the job requires a lot of training, maybe it’s better to look for permanent staff. If hiring a temp worker is the most viable option, he or she must be a high-ability learner. If the employee can’t learn the ropes of the job in a timely manner, you may never have the chance to reap the benefits of hiring a temp employee.
• Productivity: Your decision to hire wrong temp staff may negatively affect productivity for a long time. One or more bad team players can easily make other workers unhappy and less productive. Some of your good, long-term employees may even quit their jobs if you choose to protect a temp employee who can’t or doesn’t want to get along with the rest of the team. Ultimately, this will cost you a lot of money.
• Revenue: When hiring temp staff members, it’s imperative to check if they’re able to perform specific tasks. If one of the new employees has terrible customer service skills, for example, you may lose a lot of customers and revenue. In this situation, firing or transferring the employee to another department right away can help you minimize your losses.

 

Hiring a “bad apple” can make you lose some of your top employees, customers, and revenue – shortly, he or she can destroy your business. You may also need to repeat the entire hiring process in order to replace the wrong hire. This means that you must cover additional interview, employment testing, and training expenses. Obviously, you can avoid all these by hiring the right temp staff from the very beginning.

How to Hire Great Temp Staff

The skills and experience of a person tell you very little about his or her intentions, integrity, and character. To make sure that a particular candidate is the employee you’re looking for, check the following three strategies.

 

• Application Form: By developing an effective, detailed application form, you can capture crucial information that a recruit may not provide in his or her resume.
• Reference Checks: When performing reference checks, it’s important to contact former employers. This is the only way to make sure that your applicants worked where they say they worked, in the capacities they claim, and for the periods stated in their resumes.
• Psychometric Testing: A psychometric test can tell you whether an applicant will meet your expectations or not.

 

Although following these points can help you find the right temp staff, they’re very expensive and time consuming. To save time and money, the best way to get the employees you need, when you need them is to approach a reputable temp staffing agency.