What's it like hiring staff for short-term assignments…
Discussion
...at the moment.
We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
StevieBee said:
...at the moment.
We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
What skills / experience are you looking for? That seems quite low to be honest. My youngest works in Maccy's whilst at University and I'm fairly sure she's on £10-£11 per hour. For temporary contracts I'd expect to pay more.We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
We recruit temp Finance staff and at the moment we're paying 9(o the Agency)
£22 per hour for Finance Assistants
£27 per hour for junior auditors
Cheers all.
The most important personal attribute is reliability. For waste monitoring, the team has to start early - at least an hour before the waste truck starts its first round and maintain that advance working for the rest of the day. If just one or two people fail to show up it can render that day's work useless and we then have to wait two weeks to try again. We do build contingency in to cover this but have had entire teams decide not to show up - which is part of the reason we previously abandoned this type of service provision.
The rates I quoted are (or were) typically non-London. The last project like this we did was in London and paid £14ph (£19ph for the Team Leader).
Countdown said:
What skills / experience are you looking for? That seems quite low to be honest.
Work is around waste monitoring - sending people out to record the households that haven't put their recycling out or recycled the wrong thing, some public engagement (doorstep), putting stickers on bins, etc. Soft skills are weighted more than qualifications or experience. The most important personal attribute is reliability. For waste monitoring, the team has to start early - at least an hour before the waste truck starts its first round and maintain that advance working for the rest of the day. If just one or two people fail to show up it can render that day's work useless and we then have to wait two weeks to try again. We do build contingency in to cover this but have had entire teams decide not to show up - which is part of the reason we previously abandoned this type of service provision.
The rates I quoted are (or were) typically non-London. The last project like this we did was in London and paid £14ph (£19ph for the Team Leader).
Agency work is, at least in heavily populated areas, very much a job-seekers market at present - there are more jobs than people.
This has eased off to an extent in the last 12 months, but it's still very prevalent.
Added to that, it's at this time of year that companies start to gear up for Q4 so are upping pay rates and incentives to attract temp staff for the Black Friday/Xmas peak.
If you need to add staff in numbers, talk to a local agency - they should be able to give you a handle on the local market.
This has eased off to an extent in the last 12 months, but it's still very prevalent.
Added to that, it's at this time of year that companies start to gear up for Q4 so are upping pay rates and incentives to attract temp staff for the Black Friday/Xmas peak.
If you need to add staff in numbers, talk to a local agency - they should be able to give you a handle on the local market.
StevieBee said:
...at the moment.
We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
Could have written this exact post. But applicants have increased massively in the past month so perhaps something has changed in the air. We used to run projects requiring pools of people to work on projects for a period of time - between 1 and 3 months normally - around the £11 to £15 an hour mark.
Used to be worth doing with high margins and we'd built a solid reputation for delivering very good work. Over the past five years though, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit the required numbers forcing us to take on people we'd wouldn't normally because there's little option. We'd up the hourly rate but this got close to the point where it wasn't worth our time doing the work so we removed the service from our offering.
However, we've been asked to provide a proposal for a project that looks interesting and profitable but does need the support of around 10 to 15 people for five weeks.
Not having done any of this type of recruitment over the past two years, just curious to see what the situation is at the moment.
You mention raiding rates. Did you try increasing client rates proportionally to match the required wages? What happened?
Our industry has a long lead time so it’s tricky to monitor the impact on client rate rises but the modest increases we have so far implemented have so far been accepted without comment.
lizardbrain said:
You mention raiding rates. Did you try increasing client rates proportionally to match the required wages? What happened?
A good point. Our clients for this type of work was/is Local Authorities. They either set the project budget that's available and thus the amount we can pay people - or to win the bid, we'd have to be competitive on price to win the work, which also set the pay rate. On the latter, we did start to increase the hourly rate but this would come out of our margin. For a while, this worked well. Because we were paying more, we got better people and were able to claw back margin through various efficiencies that would not have been possible with lesser calibre people. It was a bit of a risk but worked out OK. For a good three or four years, we'd found a sweet spot where we could pay above average hourly rates, get the best people and deliver outstanding results for less cost than our competitors.
During 2017, the number of applicants we'd receive for each project fell off a cliff. We had one project in 2018 where we ended up paying a few people the equivalent of £40k a year to stick labels on bins, a project on which we made hardly anything.
We did start to load this premium onto bids and went from a strike rate on wins from 1 in 3 to around 1 in 7. We were loosing against two NGO type operations that benefited from all manner of external financial grants and support and less motivated by the need to make a profit. We could compete head on with these guys previously but became less able to during this period.
I've heard that they have also withdrawn from this type of service (and that another commercial competitor has gone bust) which has piqued my interest in getting back into this type of work.
The work is important and needs doing and I sense that the clients have recognised the need to accept that prices will need to increase. But that's of no use if I can't get the people to do the work.
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