No matter what the nature is of your business, you may find a need to hire temporary employees, especially when the holiday season approaches.
Often the fact that they are just going to be temporary employees and that hiring them should not be as tedious when compared to hiring long-term employees catches up.
Remember that hiring unqualified staff can harm the business. A short-term sacrifice of quality standards in the hiring process can lead to long-term chaos and headaches. You don’t want that to happen.
The mindset that they will be with the company for just a short period, plus the fact that they need to be on board right away, can lead to many errors and problems caused by unsystematically hiring temp workers.
Here we have listed five of the most dangerous mistakes you should avoid when recruiting short-term employees.
Rushing the Hiring Process
Some companies skip all the small yet necessary steps in hiring to meet the numbers. They let go of the interviews, shorten the exams, and even neglect the importance of a background check in an attempt to employ temporary workers fast.
Eliminating these essential parts of the screening processes will speed up the hiring but can compromise the quality of your new hires. Remember, being a short-term employee doesn’t excuse them from going through an intensive quality check.
Take note: Your employees, short-term or not, will represent your business. So it is essential to vet them well before you allow them to take space inside your business.
Lowering Your Hiring Standards
Just because you need a lot of people to fill in several positions in your business, doesn’t mean you have to loosen the belts of compliance. With this goal in mind, some hiring managers tend to accept applicants with incomplete requirements or unaccomplished assessments just for the sake of getting people on board.
In our fear to lose a potential candidate, we let go of other requirements and accept the applicant for the position. Doing so will put the company at risk of hiring unqualified employees which will undoubtedly impact the company’s performance.
This should not be the case at all. Don’t lower the hiring standards as it may negatively impact your brand.
Skipping the Proper Training
Short-term employees also need proper training as much as your full-time employees do. Temporary workers, although provisional, should undergo rigorous training before deployment.
Quality training produces quality employees, so short training will only produce incompetent workers. And we all know that unskilled worker can make frequent mistakes.
We tend to focus so much on fulfilling the positions that we forget other important details such as providing proper training to prepare your new hires for the work.
Lack of Communication
When we hire employees for a short-term contract, we need to be transparent with the contract details such as the project timeframe and the scope of work.
To avoid misunderstanding between employees and employer, recruiters need to be transparent with the employment duration since some applicants may be looking a for a full-time and long-term role with a company.
When the contract terms are not correctly set and disclosed during the hiring process may lead to disappointment and frustration on both sides.
Biased Treatment
Temporary workers should be treated equally just like everybody else in the company. This also applies to training, benefits, and salary just like a regular employee.
Make your temporary workers feel like they are part of a family despite being a seasonal recruit. Although they are temporary, they are an added asset to your business and should be valued. As a result, they will pay you forward by performing well and doing the job right.
Give them the best experience possible; it will leave them with a good impression of your company, which they will happily share with their friends, family, and colleagues. Word of mouth combined with social media can be a pretty powerful megaphone. You want that message to be a positive one.
Ultimately, you should consider the fact that they are an excellent source of additional workforce you can reach out to whenever the need arises.
To sum it up, hiring a seasonal employee is nothing short of hiring for full-time positions. There is no shortcut to success, and the same goes for recruiting the future best assets of the company. Remember that a reasonable employee starts with the excellent recruitment practice. It is the key to the success of the entire company, regardless of the industry.
Pro Tip: Every year, a busy season strikes, thus driving the need for seasonal employees. Take note of the timeframe, so you can plan and strategize the best ways to hire fast without compromising the quality.