Hiring has always been hard, but it’s only gotten harder. With more than seven billion people on the planet and the rise of digital employment applications, businesses can be inundated with hundreds of applications for single job opening. This adds time, effort, expense and headaches to the hiring process that only compound the difficulties employers have always had with trying to fill job openings.

This is likely one reason for the rise of the gig economy. But it also is a good reason to turn to a temp agency for certain types of jobs.

Some skilled jobs need to be done in house. Some roles cannot be effectively outsourced as gig work. You need someone to come in and do it on site and do it in an employee format, not a gig worker format.

Engineers are one such role, along with other professionals and technical staff. Such roles tend to not be served well by hiring people on a “gig” basis, in other words for a single project or task at a time. They generally need to be more plugged in than that.

One of the benefits of using a temp agency is that they have a ready pool of talent available. This pool of talent has already been interviewed and determined to be qualified to do the work.

Using a temp agency reduces costs in real terms because they already have talent lined up. There is no need to advertise and try to figure out how to reach talent, sort through a pile of resumes and so forth. They just need to match pre-qualified talent from their short list in their existing pool.

This saves you time in the hunt for someone to fill the role. Time is money, so getting someone on board promptly instead of spending possibly weeks on the hiring process can be a make or break move for a small business.

If you are a business, hiring is just one of the many tasks you must do. For temp agencies, matching the right candidate to the right job is the primary thing they do. So they have more experience with this part of the equation than you likely ever will have. Drawing upon their years of experience can add incalculable value to your bottom line.

They handle overhead costs involved. You don’t need to do the time-consuming paperwork involved with on-boarding a new employee. You just need to pay the temp agency and they handle the rest.

This saves money but it also saves time, effort and headaches. Sidestepping that process also saves money, but simply sidestepping the process has inherent value.  

Using a temp agency can give you a chance to “try before you buy” so to speak. It can let you see how well you like a candidate, how well they fit in with the rest of your team and how well they do the job before you consider offering to let them stay on as a permanent hire. This increases job security in a tough job marketplace.

This prevents you from committing too soon to the wrong candidate. It makes it much easier and much less painful to say to yourself “Well, this person isn’t quite right for the role” rather than saying to yourself “Yes, they are kind of a square peg, but we will try to make it work anyway because we’ve already invested so much time, money and effort into the process.”

You can think of it sort of like “dating” a job candidate instead of ordering a “mail order bride.” It gives you the chance to get to know them before making a commitment.

If you find yourself with a sudden, unexpected opening and you need it filled quickly, you should not hesitate to contact a temp agency to solve your short-term problem promptly. In the process, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that you have tripped across the perfect candidate for the long term.