There’s no doubt that hiring temporary staff can help your company to run more smoothly and efficiently. You save money and keep your regular staff from burning out when you use temporary staff to handle overtime, and you can ride the ebbs and flows of your business with always the appropriate-sized staff on hand.

The tricky part is hiring temporary staff. Let’s walk through the steps of hiring temporary employees to keep your company operating at peak performance.

Screening and Interviewing.

This may be the most time-consuming part of the hiring process, but that’s because it’s so important. Screening and interviewing begin with advertising. You’ve got to get the word out somehow, so you need to post a job description that is well-written enough to attract the most qualified candidates while still explaining that the position is temporary.

Once you have received applications, you must go through them and decide which of the applicants ought to be interviewed. Of course, if you’re unsure of your ability to sort through the applications, you can interview everyone, but that will take many, many hours of your time. Once you have interviewed the applicants, you will have a better idea of which candidates have the necessary skills and experience and who would fit in well in your company’s culture, but you still ought to screen the candidates to cover your bases.

Screening includes following up with previous employers and checking for accuracy on the application. Depending on the job qualifications, you might also need to ensure that candidates have current certifications and training.

Administrative and Personnel Tasks

Once you have chosen qualified temporary staff to help your company, you must take care of administrative and personnel tasks like collecting tax information, explaining benefits, and entering information into your payroll system. This can get tricky with temporary staff because they’re treated differently in the eyes of the law regarding benefits, hiring and laying off guidelines, unemployment insurance, and more.

Health and Safety Concerns

Your regular employees are accustomed to the health and safety issues associated with your place of business. They have been properly trained, and because you have ongoing training meetings, you don’t need to worry about them. With temporary staff, however, you need to make a special point to ensure that they’re aware of health and safety information. They may or may not have been present at your last training meeting, depending on the staffing needs of your company that day. Keeping track of health and safety training for temporary staff is important, and you need to find a way to manage this responsibility.

Human Resources

When you hire temporary staff, you need to have a human resources contact who can manage the unique needs of these workers. Do you have someone in human resources who can locate temporary staff when you need them? Is there a full-time worker on your staff who can keep track of timekeeping, pay cheques, training, and orientations for temporary staff? Without someone to specifically manage your temporary staff, you could find yourself flustered and disorganized.

Clearly, managing temporary staff on your own is a big job. If you’d like all the benefits of temporary staff without the inherent difficulties, consider hiring a temporary staffing firm to manage your temp workers for you. A temporary staffing firm will take care of all advertising, sourcing, interviewing, and screening. They pay the workers directly, so you don’t have to even enter your temporary staff in your payroll system. They manage health and safety training, and they mediate any issues that arise along the way. They make it easy.