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With the implications of COVID-19 continuing to affect our working environment, temporary work will be crucial to rebuilding our economy. For employers, temporary work increases adaptability, reduces staffing costs and risks of a bad hire. With job seeker’s increasing desire for flexibility, temporary work can be the perfect arrangement.

Many employers’ resistance to introducing temporary staff is caused by concerns like increase in staff training demands and the inaccurate reputation of temporary workers being unreliable. However, by working with a recruitment agency to put together a thorough hiring strategy that combines temporary and permanent staff dependent on your unique needs, your business will quickly reap the rewards.

Here's our considerations for engaging temporary staff:

Avoid a Costly Bad Hire

We’ve all been there. Your ideal employee walks through the door with a promise of long-term commitment and dedication to their work. By their second week, you’ve realised a huge gap in the expectations they created for you in their interview. Business Review Australia quoted, a bad hire can cost a business up to 2.5 times the salary of the employee. This includes costs such as advertising fees, time spent recruiting, salary payments, staff training, rehiring costs and potentially any legal costs that you may have incurred.

By hiring temporary staff, your recruitment agency becomes responsible for payroll, sickness and maternity leave, holiday pay and any costs incurred from a termination.

Increase Flexibility

If there’s one thing a global pandemic has taught us it’s the importance of adaptability. A temporary workforce allows for flexible work arrangements that can immediately be adjusted with zero cost to the business. Throughout COVID-19 and a series of lockdowns, many companies had to make the difficult decision to let go of several permanent staff members. This is devastating for businesses both personally and professionally. This type of decision also comes at a very high cost when considering the recruitment required post-pandemic and the emotional burden of letting go of dedicated and hard-to-replace employees.

While the pandemic is an extreme case, having a mixture of temporary and permanent staff allows businesses to be better prepared for anything. Whether it’s a pandemic, fluctuating business success or other unforeseen circumstances.

Workplace Morale

When there are skill shortages within any organisation, it can be very frustrating for staff member to continually take on tasks and projects they weren’t hired to do. Not to mention these tasks are often in addition to their current workload. Additionally, hiring a permanent employee out of desperation often means business owners sacrifice cultural fit. Both circumstances have a drastic impact on workplace morale and put you at risk of increased employee turnover.

Increased Productivity

Many employers believe engaging a temporary workforce can be disruptive and unreliable. Reality is, temporary workers actually increase productivity in a number of ways: -

• bring a new perspective,
• improve onboarding processes for future recruits,
• complete bespoke projects,
• remove the stress and overrun workloads of current employees,
• and cover employee absences without the business expense of a permanent employee.

Eliminate Skill Shortages

Not in the place to hire someone new but there’s a skill or project demanding staff attention? Not only is this disruptive to their workday, it is also unfair to ask your current staff to take on tasks their job description doesn’t include, without compensation. Hiring a temporary staff member completely alleviates this problem. Whether you’re building a new website and need someone to lead the project or require an admin assistant to help with filing or answering phones, with temporary staff, you can do so with very little disruption.

At Pace, we consider your current hiring strategy and can provide an extensive proposal outlining how to get more out of your team. One of the most overlooked areas of business strategies, is hiring. With staff and labour costs being, most commonly, a business’ highest expense, we know the benefits you can gain from even a half hour conversation with one of our consultants. If you’re considering implementing a temporary workforce, consider partnering with Pace for all your hiring strategy needs.

Source:

https://www.chandlermacleod.com/blog/2018/09/the-true-cost-of-hiring-the-wrong-person#:~:text=Financial%20Costs&text=In%20fact%2C%20studies%20show%20the,the%20salary%20of%20the%20employee.