MightyRecruiterTemp to Perm: Why Seasonal Workers Can Make Great Full-Time Employees
You and every other hiring manager in corporate America are all looking for the same thing: the fail-safe staffing solution. However, like all professional ïHoly Grails,ï you can easily waste your career lifetime in this pursuit. The problem with finding the right hiring process may be that seemingly everyone within your industry has been taught to adhere to the same practice: setup up a job search, screen potential candidates, conduct interviews, and then make your decision. While there is no circumventing this process altogether, there certainly are ways to optimize it. Consider, for a moment, that you might have already identified the ideal candidate for your next full-time position. The trick then is simply transitioning this employee from temp to perm.
Understanding What Exactly Today’s Temp Workers Bring
For many in your position, the thought of promoting a seasonal employee from temp to perm may be daunting. Perhaps that’s due to the stigma often associated with seasonal workers, which is that they are seasonal employees for a reason. However, such a line of thinking is proving itself to be antiquated. Today’s temporary employee pool is being filled more than ever with college students looking for work between semesters and skilled professionals whose jobs were casualties of the most recent economic recession.
The Benefits of Promoting a Seasonal Employee
Given the skills that today’s seasonal labor force may bring, there are a wealth of reasons why you should think about shifting them from temp to perm before posting a position through traditional channels. Some of the more popular include:
-Low employee acquisition costs: Think, for a moment, about the financial and human resources required to make a new hire. There’s the revenue lost by no one fulfilling the role being hired for, as well as the cost to post a position and possibly hire a job placement firm. Then you have to dedicate time to reviewing the applicants, traveling candidates in to interview, and then reviewing your interview results. Finally, there’s the cumulative costs of training the new employee. If you already have a seasonal employee in place that has demonstrated the skills needed to adequately fill that role, then changing them from temp to perm completely eliminates those expenses.
-No need to train: If you do not have your own dedicated training staff in place, then you’re often forced to pull employees away from their regular job responsibilities to train new hires. This further compounds the revenue being lost in the hiring process. Yet even if you have a trainer in place, a new employee may take months to get to the point of being able to deliver optimal performance. This is why the decision to avoid bypassing your regular training schedule for seasonal employees is recommended by so many job placement experts. That way, your seasonal employees are already performing up to your standards if and when you choose to move some of them from temp to perm.
-Prior knowledge of skill set: It’s next to impossible to truly see just how one’s unique skills and experience will translate to a new job solely from the interview process. Applicants will always sell themselves high, yet many fail to live up to the lofty expectations they set once on the job. If a temporary employee has already proven him or herself to be a valued contributor to your workforce, then there’s no reason not to suspect that the same work ethic will not follow him or her to a full-time position.
In essence, your seasonal work schedule can be set up to serve as your own employee vetting process. However, the move to shift more seasonal workers from temp to perm hinges on the desire of such employees to land a full-time job. Such a desire should not be assumed. If you identify a seasonal worker that you’d like to see join you full-time, approach him or her prior to the seasonal work period ending. Gauge his or her interest, and be prepared to even negotiate benefits to bring him or her on. Even if you have to give up more in the short-term, the long-term benefit he or she may provide may be well worth it.
The number of reasons why you should seriously consider moving an effective seasonal employee from temp to perm may be too great to list here. Suffice it to say that such an option is available to you if you’re willing to take advantage of it. Are you still unsure of how to effectively tell if a certain seasonal worker would make a solid full-time addition to your team Don’t worry; Mighty Recruiter offers you a number of informational resources and tools to make this process much easier. These will help you to see which of those amongst your pool of temporary employees has it what it takes to offer a permanent benefit to your organization.