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Home > All site sections > HR blogs and comment > HR blogs > Specialists' blog

Interims are not the full answer

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Ian Buckingham

27 Oct 2010 | 16:31

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Articles more than one month old can be viewed only by CIPD members or PM Subscribers.

In June, a survey for Hays found that private-sector employers' main reason for using temporary, contract or interim workers - cited by 30 per cent - was to avoid taking them on permanently. Employers in the public sector, however, reported a more positive outlook on temporary workers, with 44 per cent citing them as essential to the success of their organisation.

It will be interesting to see how those figures will change in the face of the unprecedented downsizing implied by George Osbourne’s announcements last week, which promise large scale public-sector redundancies.

It’s apparent that one of the effects of the recession is that interim or locum working is on the rise. I know it’s hard to convince permanent employees who are staring redundancy in the face but this isn’t always a bad thing. It does allow organisations to adapt rapidly to changing economic fortunes; enables finance directors to redirect precious budget lines; transfers risk to the employee; frees the business from the most of its training and development and certainly career development responsibilities for the individuals concerned; facilitates management by objectives and it can be used to buy in expertise and objectivity at relatively short notice.

But there’s always a flipside. Relationship development and stakeholder management is linked to tenure; accountability for medium to long-term decision-making is virtually absent; there’s very little motivation for temporary or contracted staff to deliver over and above the basics; it takes time to get up to speed; and when the contract ends, much of the organisations’ intellectual property will walk out the door.

Claims about objectivity and innovation are questionable too. Just how many risks is someone going to take and how much challenge are they going to offer when they have no security in an insecure market? This is bound to adversely affect medium to long-term decision-making.

To cap it all – employers are placing the fate of important workstreams or even whole functions in the hands of contactors repeatedly sourced, screened and supplied in turn by third party recruitment firms. That’s quite a value chain.

Temp agencies are increasingly becoming key custodians of their clients' brands. They need to understand the challenges, values and culture inside out in order to place successful interims and help both parties accentuate the positives.

But I wonder how many agencies are attempting to address the unique challenges that interim candidates are likely to face. And as the interim market, like it or loathe it, seems set to continue to grow, I wonder how many HR directors are examining the interface between their internal recruiters, their agencies and their brand and considering the long-term effects of short-term expediency.