The trick is to find and select temporary employees who are actually the right fit for our client’s long term needs. And when you do that, temp to hire staffing programs can reduce a client’s recruiting costs to almost nothing. Your “temps” play a big role in a more comprehensive workforce development strategy.
Check out this scenario. A new client was opening a 50 person call center in South Seattle. Our team recognized quickly that this client needed our help to build up their local workforce. While headquartered on the East Coast, their mission involved all of the elements important to our local market – quality staff, quality processes, and quality technology. Understanding the direct impact of employee turnover on their ability to deliver the quality service mandated by their mission, they had already mastered many of the temp to hire HR practices in their other facilities. By using that model they were enjoying some of the highest rates of employee retention in the customer service industry, an important metric for call centers everywhere
This clients challenge in Seattle was to hire and train a large number of service agents quickly, while avoiding the high costs of early-term employee turnover. They needed a workforce that was flexible enough to handle a somewhat unpredictable level of call volumes. Worse case they would be over staffed for brief periods as they anticipated future call volumes. Best case, they got big pay offs for being so clearly focused on hiring the best. The temp to hire auditioning process was the perfect solution for all these goals and concerns.
Fast forward, by partnering with our recruiting team, they had full access to our recruiting power which they use to supplement their own recruiting resources. If they found an employee on their own, rather than bring them on as a direct hire, they used us to payroll service them until such time as they knew they wanted to hire. In the end, they wanted a fully flexible recruiting model that could move quickly, while maintaining an uncompromising focus on employee quality.
Tricky? Not at all. For companies’ already comfortable using temporary workers, it’s just an added twist in their temporary staffing model to make it easy for them to hire a vendor’s employee when the timing is right.
We’ve found that many high performance service centers use the temp to hire staffing strategy….
- To onboard large numbers of employees quickly;
- To use on the job performance as a selection tool to ensure that they make the right investments in long term staff;
- To enhance their ability to adjust core staffing costs in ways that aligns their costs with call volume forecasts;
- To give potential new hires an opportunity to “check them out” before saying the final “I DO’s” – one of the important components of their low turnover strategy.
Here’s how we advise our clients managing customer contact centers to think thru the factors important to determining the right staffing mix.
- Your seasonal or short-term needs for short term employees
- Your longer term plans to grow (or shrink) the size of your team
- Your rate of turnover – how long are you retaining your core employees.
- The full costs (wages, taxes, benefits, etc.) of a core employee. Know what a core employee actually costs your company, over and above their base rate of pay.
- Your internal recruiting capacity – how much will it cost to recruit on your own? How long it will take?
- The availability of talent willing to accept a temp to hire staffing process.
You can use all these factors to come up with a rough guess as to the right mix of full, part-time, and contingent (always auditioning) employees. Many of our “temp to hire” clients keep 5-10% of their teams in temporary or auditioning mode at all times as a way to minimize the impact of unwanted turnover. Other temp to hire clients are growing so fast that 25-50% of their workforce is in some stage of a temporary/auditioning role. They are using our temporary recruiting resources as a way to staff up or down quickly in a rapidly growing or changing marketplace.
The call center client mentioned above, opened their call center with a mix of 80% temps, 20% core employees transferred here from other call centers. After 6 months of auditioning and hiring, only 30% of their total call center agents were in temporary /auditioning roles. In other words, the shift to more core fewer temporary staff was gradual – making sure the right employees were hired every step of the way.
