How Do You Know If Temp Staffing Is Right for Your Business?
To business owners who have always kept tight control on their hiring, delegating temp staffing to an outside agency may seem like a gamble. What if the agency doesn’t really understand what you’re looking for? What if the temps require large amounts of training? What if the culture of your company feels diluted when you have “strangers” around?
These are good and valid questions, and it’s important to seriously consider whether or not temp staffing is right for your business. While you can’t know for sure until you try temp staffing, you can take a preliminary self-assessment by answering the following questions for yourself.
Do We need to mitigate rising costs?
If your profit margins have been shrinking, you might want to consider using temp staffing. A difficult economy and legislative changes have made it difficult for businesses to maintain their profits. Temp staffing agencies pay their employees’ benefits, unemployment, taxes, and other expenses, so you can hire temp workers for a short amount of time without increasing your fixed payroll costs. Additionally, you can reduce overtime labor costs by giving extra hours to temp workers at regular time versus paying a premium to your permanent employees.
Do We need to improve performance?
Avoid employee burnout and absenteeism during peak periods by bringing in temp workers to carry the extra load. Temp agencies can also help you in your long-term hiring process by allowing you to “try out” workers on a temporary basis before you hire them permanently. This allows you to find just the right person for the job without taking any risks. When you have a special project that requires skills not currently found in any of your current employees, you can hire a temp worker who specializes in those skills to get the job done. The results will be far superior (and less frustrating) than they would be if you had one of your regular employees “take a stab at it.” Temp staffing also helps you to improve performance by allowing the company to run “lean” when it needs to and avoid layoffs.
Do We need to save time?
If your to-do list is already longer than you can realistically tackle, you need to find ways to delegate. Delegating hiring can save you a significant amount of time. Temp staffing agencies advertise, interview, reference check, screen, and test potential workers. This screening saves you time during the hiring process and also after the workers show up on your door step. When properly selected, your temps will already have the skills needed for your work, so you won’t have to spend time training them. You’ll also save time when you hire temp workers because you won’t have to take care of their payroll. These tasks are handled by their agency.
Do We need increased flexibility?
Keeping your workforce appropriate for your current workload is one of the best things you can do to keep your bottom line healthy, but it can be very challenging, especially if you manage all of your hiring on your own. A temp agency, however, can send you just the right number of workers for any given day, allowing you a level of flexibility you’ve never before experienced. With reliable temp staffing, you can also let temp workers handle non-core business tasks, which allows your regular employees to concentrate on your core competencies.
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, it would be well worth your time to further investigate the use of temp staffing for your business. Temp staffing could save you time, increase your flexibility, improve your performance, and mitigate your costs.