3 REASONS TO HIRE TEMP WORKERS
TEMPORARY WORKERS
Temporary workers (temps) have been in the news a lot recently. Increasingly, the press on temps has been negative. Much of the bad press owes to the unscrupulous practices of large businesses and the temp agencies themselves. This raises questions about the benefit of using temps.
There are several different levels of temporary worker. There are people who work as freelancers and there are websites set up to provide both domestic and international executive assistants. What I want to discuss here are the temps who perform unskilled labor. These are people who package products and work assembly lines.
If you run a small business offering a product, there is a good chance that you will need extra help off and on during the year. This help will likely be unskilled and outside the office. I want to discuss three reasons why you should consider using temps and how to do it properly.
1. SEASONALITY
Most small businesses experience a seasonal shift in demand. You are slow during the summer and busy in the winter. You have a few months where you make most of your money and the rest of the time you get by on the big months. If you are in this situation, then you understand the difficulty of hiring people and then letting them go during seasonal fluctuations.
Temporary workers can help alleviate some of the difficulties of seasonality in your demand. Bringing on help to work in unskilled positions during the high season will allow you to keep up with demand. Sourcing employees through a temporary employment agency is much faster because the employees have already been vetted. Hiring seasonal employees is time consuming. It requires a lot of effort to find and evaluate the candidate before hiring. This can waste valuable time when increasing capacity to meet seasonal demand.
During the “busy season”, you may find yourself or your managers pushing employees harder and increasing overtime. Creating a work crew that can handle demand efficiently, rather than working your core group to the bone, is critical to reducing employee burnout and turnover. Temp employees can help reduce the burden on permanent employees and the cost of overtime.
2. EVALUATION
Hiring is a very difficult and time-consuming process. There are very few people who can say with confidence that they are happy with every hire they ever made. This is mostly due to the hiring process. During hiring, you must rely on a limited view of what a candidate can actually do under pressure. People are on their best behavior. It has been said that those who get jobs are the ones best at the job search and may not be the best for the job.
Unskilled labor is a particularly difficult place to evaluate an employee. Work ethic, more than other skills, has a huge affect on the success of an unskilled employee. It is almost impossible to evaluate a person’s work ethic from a resume or their hand picked references. On the other hand, giving a person time to learn the organization and perform under pressure can provide valuable insight into their personality and work ethic.
Using temporary agencies to bring on potential candidates can help to provide a low risk, low cost method of evaluation. Temporary employment agencies can help source candidates that are potential fits for your organization. Having these prospects work at the company for a period of time will allow you to evaluate their performance. Temporary employment agencies do place some restrictions on this type of hiring and may require you pay them for some predetermined number of hours before you can hire. Look at this as an opportunity to take the time to truly evaluate a candidate.
Temps evaluated in this manner will give you a better idea of how well they can perform under pressure. This may also provide you the opportunity to see how they act once they are comfortable with their surroundings. If the employee doesn’t meet your standards, then the contract can be terminated and new candidate can be evaluated. You may find that you learned something about what you want and don’t want in the next candidate.
3. ONE TIME AND SPECIAL ORDERS
We all have customers who are unable to predict the demand for your product. This can lead to larger than expected orders. Creating a great relationship with your customer includes responding to increased demand quickly. It can be hard to find the time and labor internally to handle this sudden increase in demand. This is where temps can be invaluable.
Having a good working relationship with a temporary employment agency is key to using temps. Once established, this relationship can provide you with quick help when necessary. Rather than running overtime and pushing your employees too hard, bringing in temps to help handle the load may be a better option.
The additional labor, if managed correctly, can help you decrease your turnaround time and get the product out the door in a hurry. This can have a huge impact on customer relationships and chargebacks. Having built a relationship with your temporary employment agency will allow you to get the help you need quickly. Temporary employment agencies can often provide employees the very next day. If the agency understands your process and your needs, they will be able to source employees who are more likely to be a good fit.
DOING IT RIGHT
The benefits of hiring temps have been outlined but much of the discussion in the news is not about what hiring a temp does for the company but what it does not do for the temps. Finding the right temporary employment agency and evaluating their practices is crucial to getting good staff.
Temporary employment agencies with abusive practices provide low quality service to the employees they source and this will likely result in low quality service to you. These employees may already be disgruntled before they even start to work for you. Every agency is different and it is vital that you evaluate the options in your area before choosing an agency.
Once you have found a high quality agency, the key to using a temporary employment agency properly is treating temporary employees well. Temps often have many different assignments and work with other temps at their agency. They talk about the experiences they have had and which companies they liked and didn’t like working for. Providing temps with a good experience will ensure that other temps from the same agency have a positive opinion of your company before they start.
To begin with, always treat them as you would your own employees. If the temps are there on longer assignments or for evaluation, find ways to include them in the company. When I was using temporary labor, I ensured that we involved temps in all of the activities we could. This included paying for admission to events during a health challenge and inviting them to company luncheons. This level of involvement helps build better relationships, which can increase the productivity and happiness of the temps you employ.
Temps who return to your company after a previous assignment are already trained. You can get them working faster and you can get more for your investment. If temps enjoy their time with your company, they are more likely to take a second assignment with you. This reduction in training time can save a lot of money and help increase productivity during seasonality or large orders.
It is also important to understand where the temporary employment agency is sourcing. If the temps are driving 45 minutes or more, you will find it difficult to count on them and this will lead to higher turnover. Find agencies that are sourcing locally so that travel time is low.
If you follow these rules, you can responsibly use temporary labor and provide a quality work place for these employees. Don’t forget that temporary employment can have as great an effect on your bottom-line as your permanent employees. Maintain a positive relationship with temps and the temporary employment agency and you will increase productivity and lead-times providing a better quality of service to your customer.
