What do you do when you’re looking to bring in temporary support? Do you take a copy of your permanent spec and try to find the perfect match or, perhaps you look at your biggest challenges and understand what work your team can easily pass over with minimal training from their areas of responsibility?
What does your team focus on when you are hiring a temporary employee to work alongside them? Are they looking for the full skill package or, are they looking for someone who can learn at pace but also fit well culturally within the team, be relied upon and be willing to help?
Each temporary hire is unique, and the important parts that we focus on when hiring is likely to be different when viewed from an operational vs. the team’s perspective (who, inevitably, will be the day-to-day point of contact for all those little process questions that pop up along the way!).
Having worked within the temporary market for over 10 years now (that’s a stat that scares me) around 8/10 I see clients initially start looking for the perfect, documented, skill set but hire the “wild card” without the direct experience of (in the case we’ll use systems as an example) the systems they initially wanted BUT in possession of all the transferable skills and the personality to fit the culture!
Temporary hires can have such an amazing impact on a business and a team, they can help in more ways than you initially expected when you hire the right person, so while this blog might be short but sweet it will hopefully be a good conversation starter next time you are looking to bring a temporary hire in!
If you are looking for further guidance on temporary hires, drop me a line at jmahoney@theonegroup.co.uk.