Do you need a lot of temporary workers for your business? If temporary hiring is important to you, having a short-term hiring strategy is a must. A hiring strategy ensures the alignment of recruitment with key business goals. It also improves quality-of-hire and reduces recruitment costs leading to better business outcomes.

A short-term hiring strategy must encompass every aspect of recruitment from planning to onboarding. Use this template to devise a suitable plan to meet your business goals.

1. Assessing Manpower Needs

Manpower assessment is the first step to create a relevant hiring strategy. Whether you’re hiring for a specific project, or simply filling a leave vacancy for a permanent worker, it is important to be absolutely clear about your manpower needs. This includes determining the right hiring mix of permanent, temporary and contractual staff. The correct assessment of manpower needs is the basic foundation of any successful hiring strategy.

2. Searching for Employees

While job ads are important, employee referrals have certain distinct advantages like reduced hiring time and better conversion rates. Temping agencies are popular with companies that have a recurring demand for short-term employees (more on temping agencies later).

Irrespective of the recruitment channel chosen, the job description is crucial. A good job description is one which emphasises clarity and detail with a focus on the following elements:

• Job title
• Job purpose
• Duties and responsibilities
• Educational qualifications
• Experience
• ‘Must-have’ skills
• ‘Good-to-have’ skills
• Working conditions
• Remuneration

An effective job description provides all necessary information while also being brief and direct. Employers should eliminate any ambiguity by providing a complete picture of the nature of the operations and processes involved, to get quality applications.

3. Sticking to Timelines

Once the framework is in place, it is time to spring into action!

Set down a time limit for hiring and ensure that you stick to it. It is essential to move fast because temps have a tendency to take up the first available job. Since they get paid only for the period they are employed, time is a crucial factor that influences their job choices.

At the same time, be wary of compromising on your selection standards to speed up the hiring process. Bad hires could have major consequences for the business including damage to productivity and employee morale.

4. Using Suitable Technology

Technology can be a great enabler in carrying out high-volume recruitment. Whether you are looking for temporary, seasonal or contractual manpower, technologies like Freelance Management Systems (FMS) and Vendor Management Systems (VMS) can improve efficiencies by streamlining recruitment and coordination. FMS function as a single-point interface between freelancers and businesses, whereas VMS are useful in managing employees drawn from different recruitment agencies.

However, it is important to carefully consider which platform is suitable for you. While technology adoption can bring substantial gains by improving operational efficiencies, their alignment with organisational culture and business goals must be taken into account while selecting which platform to invest in.

5. Developing a Robust Onboarding Programme

Even with time constraints, it is never a good idea to skip the onboarding process. A robust onboarding process is indispensable for the swift integration of temps. It must be tailored to their unique needs and requirements with an aim to help them become productive in the shortest possible time. A curtailed onboarding programme that contains basic information about the company combined with detailed instructions on the project/assignment is a good model to follow in this respect.

Bonus Tip: Collaborating with Temping Agencies

Among the best ways to recruit short-term employees involves collaborating with a temping agency. They are well networked among candidates which makes them ideally placed to supply short-term manpower to businesses.

By collaborating with a temping agency, you are relieved of the entire burden of recruitment, as the complete responsibility for it is assumed by them. They will source, screen and shortlist suitable candidates, leaving the final selection for the client.

For companies looking for skilled manpower like lawyers and accountants, specialised temping agencies are the best option. Apart from having a rich pool of candidates, they also possess deep industry knowledge which makes them uniquely suited for your hiring needs.

Convergence and Strategy

Hiring a single person is easy, doing it successfully in large volumes is not. The role of a hiring strategy is to enable companies to meet the challenge of maintaining consistently high recruitment standards, while ensuring resource optimisation, through the laying down of relevant guidelines. Good hiring strategies lead to the convergence of hiring practices with business goals to create desirable business outcomes. A hiring strategy for temps must factor in the unique nature of the short-term work model to successfully deliver results.

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