3 Tips for Strategically Hiring Temp Employees

The job market might be on the mend, but HR and recruiting professionals won’t be celebrating any time soon. 66% of respondents in an Xpert HR survey say they’re worried that recruiting and hiring will be somewhat or very challenging in 2021. Frankly, the ongoing skills shortages paired with planned selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) budget reductions of 4% to 11% are distressing, and they explain why many candidate searches remain paused.

Rather than delaying growth and productivity, organizations are hiring temporary workers to resolve urgent workloads without exhausting budgets. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch and letting new candidates flow into your pipeline. Here are tips you need to follow if you want to successfully hire temporary employees:

1. Create the right candidate profiles

Permanent employees have the ability to grow into a position, where temporary workers need to hit the ground running. For that reason, hiring managers need a firm grasp on the criteria that will make a temp employee thrive within the role and the organization. The trick is building candidate profiles.

A candidate profile is a representation of your ideal candidate based on data and first-hand experience. Though there are quite a few questions that go into the process of developing personas, here are five questions that you should use to pinpoint the best possible temp talent:

• What skill sets, certifications, and experience does your ideal candidate have? 
• What strengths do they require? What weaknesses are acceptable for the role?
• What are your ideal candidate’s career goals? Where do they see themselves in five years?
• How much training does your ideal candidate need to succeed in their role?
• How much support does your ideal candidate need to succeed in their role?

This preliminary work influences all of your hiring activities: creating job descriptions, recruitment marketing, branding, and even crafting persuasive selling points for the interview. Targeting a well-thought out persona will bring better candidates into your recruitment funnel and ensure you’re inviting the right talent to join your organization.

2. Access & leverage pre-existing talent pools

As we all know, the best candidates don’t remain on the market for long (if they even make it to the job search). Some estimates suggest that the cream of the crop is available for less than 10 days. Plus, depending on the complexity of the role or experience required, it might be difficult to locate and attract high-quality temporary talent in a timely manner – especially if your industry is in the midst of local talent shortages or seasonal demands.

Working with a staffing firm can streamline your search for qualified candidates. For starters, the right firm will have access to a host of connections in your target market or disciplines, making your search and candidate submissions faster. Some firms even retain IT consultants, accelerating placement timelines while reducing your employment responsibility.

3. Screen candidates quickly & effectively

Once you believe you’ve attracted the right candidates into your recruitment funnel, you’ve got to move fast to lock them down. The screening process is often one of the most time consuming, and inaccurate, parts of hiring. These days, on-site interviews aren’t usually in the cards, and a resume or a phone screen can only give you so much insight into the worker and their abilities.

For instance, let’s say you’re considering four solid candidates submitted by your staffing partner or recruiting team. With a typical interview process, you’d need to find overlapping availability in your schedule with each of those potential hires to have a phone screen, review their responses, and make a decision.

Instead, companies are using a phone screen alternative: one-way video interviewing tools like interview on demand to ask candidates questions; assess their abilities and communication skills; and more accurately determine their fit for a position.

Using a one-way video interview, candidates record responses on their own time which you can then review in your own time as well. That’s hours of time back in your day to lock down talent before the competition (and less pesky back-end admin!).

Hiring is nuanced because people are nuanced – no matter how prepared you are, there’s bound to be some barrier to overcome. But, if you plan correctly, leverage your resources, and implement the right tools, your temp hiring strategy will improve leaps and bounds, allowing you to uncover and land talent before your competition can say “phone interview.”

Our experts will show you the ropes – click here for a demo of interview on demand and the rest of the interviewstream platform today.

About The Author

Monique Mahler is the CEO of interviewstream. She is an avid researcher of facts, a self proclaimed marketing geek, and an equestrian in her spare time.