Why taking a temporary role right now could just be your next great career move.
Let’s all take ourselves back to Thursday 31st December 2019. My friends got engaged, we had the most wonderful New Year’s Eve and naturally we took far too many photos holding signs about how amazing 2020 was going to be! Well, the wedding got postponed, obviously, and so did many recruitment plans.
Well, like recruitment plans, the wedding was still “business critical”. Yes, numbers had to adjust (all of a sudden it became luxury vs. essential); the essential list still took a lot of work and the luxuries, in fact, were still needed.
Why am I linking recruitment to a wedding? Well, I speak with many HR professionals on a weekly basis and in amongst these are Internal Recruiters. Remember the challenge with ventilator numbers, the huge numbers of staff that had to (and still have to) quarantine, adjustments in capacity with changing workforces and the home schooling dilemma that swept across our nation?
Suddenly, this recruitment needed to happen; much of the recruitment without a permanent headcount adjustment in many cases.
Some businesses just found that they were much busier; profits were growing and still there was a “freeze” on recruitment spend. Internal recruiters became worth their weight in gold if businesses had managed to retain these critical functions and clients experiencing these surges took on ex-agency or internal recruiters on temporary contracts to assist them through the murky waters.
We have supported our clients' HR teams by placing candidates to support with their recruitment – whether that be with specialist recruiters or individuals that can help with recruitment and other projects, freeing up time for you to spend on other areas that need your focus, such as L&D or Employee Wellbeing.
As an example, Candidate X took an interim internal role to assist a client through a busy period in their business. In terms of what the temporary role has done for her career, she says,
“I went into the position with no expectations. It was good to use my fast-paced, recruitment skills to assist a business through a period of large-scale interim and permanent recruitment. I would not have usually considered this assignment but with a weaker job market it seemed like a sensible choice. I have now made over 25 hires, 60% temp/40% perm ratio and have also been offered a permanent role with the company and they are putting me through CIPD level 3. In hindsight my career grew through Covid but only by adjusting my initial expectations for long-term gain.”
If you want to discuss how you could benefit from a temp in your team or would like to see how temporary work could suit you, please reach out – jmahoney@theonegroup.co.uk.