Temping agencies offer a specific type of staffing solution to companies, providing a stable of temporary employees (or “temps”) available for short- and long-term work placements. These workers are retained and compensated by their agency, which loans them out to client companies. Though temps are often hired to fill specific roles with limited durations, many agencies also supply temps-to-hire, giving client companies the opportunity to offer temporary workers permanent positions either during or upon completion of their assignments. Many companies now look to fill irregular or seasonal job vacancies with temps, saving themselves search and placement time, while avoiding the costly mistake of making permanent hires to solve temporary needs.
One of the biggest advantages of using temporary workers is an increase in the speed and efficiency of the staffing process. When companies employ temp agencies to fill immediate roles and satisfy pressing needs, they save their own internal departments the extensive time required to solicit, evaluate, and onboard new hires. Companies are also able to take advantage of an agency’s considerable resources, including active and ongoing relationships with job-seekers. Most temp agencies offer skills and competency tests for potential workers, allowing for easy sorting and qualification of candidates. Over time, agency representatives and placement officers develop strong working knowledge of their client companies, which allows them to be even more discriminating when providing temporary workers with more specific abilities.
The structure of most client-agency relationships means that companies can communicate details such as number and type of workers needed, skills (either desired or required), and proposed rates of compensation. Companies also inform agency staffers of work locations, expected job durations, and any applicable codes of conduct and attire, which the agency can then pass along to their potential candidates. Once temps are placed in contracted roles, it remains their responsibility to stay in communication with their agency representatives or supervisors, to whom they are to direct any issues, concerns, or complaints during the course of their particular assignments. This report structure helps to mitigate and even eliminate many internal pressures the can arise from employee conflict, as both temps and client companies can avoid confrontation by dealing directly with the supplying agency. In most cases, companies can quickly replace unsatisfactory temps with agency substitutions and dismiss workers who are no longer needed at any time, regardless of contract stipulations. Some agencies will guarantee a certain amount of work or pay to their employees, but this obligation does not apply to client companies, which are only beholden to the terms of their overall agreement with the agency.
By hiring and maintaining their own employee pools, temporary work agencies are also able to save their client companies from many of the human resource obligations that would otherwise accompany such staffing additions. Since temps remain official employees of their respective agencies, businesses to which they are contracted can avoid the direct cost of benefits, employer taxes, and payments into social security and retirement funds. While agencies will sometimes provide career resources, health insurance and investment programs to those workers who meet certain requirements, it is more typical for temporary employees to go without – exchanging some of the usual advantages of permanent work for quicker placement and job flexibility.
By offering strong business incentives to companies and continuous work opportunities to job-seekers, temping agencies continue to be a strong economic force within any market, providing qualified candidates for immediate, seasonal, and even long-term positions; accelerating the hiring and on-boarding process, which allows corporations to get more work done efficiently and well, with drastic reductions in both overhead and personnel costs.