Planning the Hiring Of Temps

Your company has full-time, year-round employees.  During your company’s busy season, though, you hire temporary employees to do a wide variety of tasks to handle the added workload as it is more economically feasible than hiring additional full-time employees that increase your overall WSIB risk, and then laying the employees off after the busy period.

In the past, you’ve had good temps and bad temps. On a few occasions, a couple of unexpected resignations by your full-time employees left you so short-handed that you quickly hired temps to replace them, but then the sudden hires didn’t work out.

You know the value of good temps so you want to utilize them better. What should you do? The very first thing you need to do is plan. You absolutely cannot wait for an opening to begin looking for temporary workers.

How far in advance should you contact a temp agency before the date that you need the temps? There are no set rules, but here’s a tip — establish a strong personal and professional relationship with one or more two temp agencies so they understand you and your business. After that relationship is established, you will know how much time the temp agency needs to find an excellent admin person, or general labourers for your warehouse or manufacturing facility.

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In general, a temp agency that is attuned to your employment needs and culture will be more apt to find the best temp for you if it has more time.  It might, for example, have the perfect temps for you, but they are now temping somewhere else or frantically awaiting an assignment. If you alert the agency about your upcoming needs a few weeks or more in advance, the agency might be able to arrange for the individual in question to work for your company before another company snaps them up.

Here are some more tips that might help you hire the best temps:

Be Specific In Your Requests:

You should absolutely not just tell the temp agency that you need a general labourer or a receptionist or admin person. You need to tell the agency specifically what tasks the temps will do, what skill levels are needed, and what are your performance expectations.

Prepare Written Performance Expectations:

Preparing written performance expectations or productivity metrics for the temporary employees will help plan your company’s activities. Then, as we mentioned, you should share them with the temp agency. More importantly, you need to tell the temps what your expectations are of them on their first day of work. The requests should be very specific. For example, what software packages are the potential temps familiar with?

 Seek The Input Of Your Employees:

The managers hiring the temps are not the only people who need to work with them effectively. Asking your full-time employees how the temps can be best utilized could improve the relationship between the full-timers and the temps and could also help improve worker productivity.

Prepare Answers To Their Questions:

Planning in advance means that you absolutely should not rush your temps into working. Devoting a few hours, even a day, to acclimating the temps into your corporate culture could be a wise investment.  The orientation session for the temps should include describing what your company does, explaining what your policies are, and explaining what specific full-time employees do and how the temps will be working with them.

Consider the Temp’s Background:

Earlier, we mentioned that your company should be very specific about what you expect of the temps you hire in terms of performance and skills. You should also make sure that the temps will fit into your corporate culture. A skilled admin person who has worked for companies in your industry might be a better fit than a better admin person who has never worked in your industry. You should also consider the educational background of your temps and their experience level. Older workers might be a better fit for your temp jobs than college students or recent college grads. The opposite might also be true.

Prepare To Train The Temps:

Preparing the training of the temporary employees you hire should include figuring out which of your full-time employees is best suited to train the temps in company-specific tasks, figuring out when the temps will need to learn how to do company-specific tasks (doing all the training at the start might be inefficient if they won’t need to do Task No. 6 for a few weeks), and setting up a procedure that will make the temps comfortable about asking questions and seeking more training.

All of the above tips sound like a lot of work. They are, but preparing how to work with temps is a very worthwhile investment, particularly if you are thinking about converting them to full-time employees someday.

Source

https://talenttribune.softwareproviders.com/5-tips-hiring-temps/; http://www.blogging4jobs.com/hr/4-tips-for-hiring-great-temporary-employees/#gCTZpYP94tQpboLp.97; http://tsne.org/tips-working-effectively-temps