A temp agency or a temporary agency, as the name suggests, is a business that provides you temporary employment. This means that this business connects its clients to employees of their choice for a temporary short-term or a contractual task. The way a temp agency makes its money is by providing the business workers according to their requirements. These workers are employed by the temporary employment agency and are a part of their talent pool.
With the help of a temp agency, employees can find both short-term and lower levels of commitment work and then switch to other tasks. Once a business reaches out to a temp agency, they save themselves from the hassle of conducting the recruitment and hiring process and also avoid the firing and downsizing process of the employees they only needed for a short-term contract.
Pros of a temp agency
Hiring a temp agency can bring about many benefits for your business. Here are a few of them:
1. Hassle-free hiring
If you want to simplify your day-to-day tasks then a temp company is the right fit for you. Rather than handling hundreds of documents every day of employees and then getting rid of them once their contract is over, you can simply hire a temp agency and they will take care of it all for your business. This would save you the time that you would otherwise waste on the hiring and firing process.
You can then spend this time elsewhere on other important processes and procedures of your business. All of this is possible because temp agencies take up the responsibility of handling the employees that comes with employing them.
2. The easy and faster hiring process
As compared to the usual hiring process carried out by companies, hiring new workers through temp agencies helps save a lot of time as it is an easy process. These agencies have a large pool of employees. They have employees from all sorts of fields so it would not be a problem to find worker for a business no matter what industry they operate in.
Normally when a company directly hires employees, it is a long process of advertising for the post to then interviewing, shortlisting, and then hiring an employee. With the help of the talent pool available with these temp agencies, these employees have already gone through the whole process so you will simply be provided with an employee without having to go through the recruitment and selection process.
3. No training and probation period required for the employees
Once you would directly hire an employee for your firm, you would make them go through various tasks to know whether they are even fit for the role or not and if they can work for your firm long term and full time.
If you find a worker with the help of these temp agencies who you feel like understands their role best at your firm then you can directly ask them to make the employee a permanent worker for your firm. This way you would not have to go through the whole trial and error process before hiring and testing an employee whether they are the right fit or not. The skills of the employee at the temp agency’s pool have already been tested for their skills hence you would not have to give them any training or hire them for a probation period to assess their performance and knowledge.
Often there is a fee attached once you want to make an employee of a temp agency a permanent employee at your business. However, the fee attached is worth all the hassle you will be saved from if you had to recruit an employee the usual way.
Cons of a temp agency
Reaching out to a temp agency may save you a lot of time and extra work but there are always some downsides to everything. Here are a few cons of hiring through a temp agency:
1. Need to meet certain conditions
Many need agencies require you to meet certain preconditions if you want to sign a contract with them. This means that you need to hire an employee for a minimum time even if their skills become redundant for you after some time. You will still have to keep them as an employee for your company. Therefore, you might still end up having to deal with the problem of excessive employees at your business which may cause crowding and disturbance at your business.
2. Little to no control over the employees
As these employees are provided by temp agencies, therefore you have little to no control over them as you will not be their direct boss. They will be responsible to report to their respective temp agencies and their administration there. Hence you might end up having to deal with the problem of these employees showing up late to work.
Moreover, once you provide these temp agencies the details about the type of workers you require, there are still chances that you may end up hiring workers that are unfit for the role at your organization. The temp agencies only provide you with employees based on their assessment. They do not know the detail and requirements of your business hence there will always be some irrelevancy with regards to the type of workers and the skills they might provide you.
3. Workers may lose motivation
Once you hire workers through temp agencies, you would not be giving them as many incentives as you would give to your regular employee. This is mainly because you are outsourcing your recruitment process and you are hiring these workers on a temporary and short-term basis. Every worker needs some sort of incentive to keep them motivated and focused on their task. Once they would not have a motive to work hard for, their performance might get affected which would affect the performance of your overall business.
So as a result even though you contacted the temp agency to save your time, this factor can end up taking more time to get the job done than usual.
