Temp Workers

Hiring a Temp for Office, Admin or Finance jobs: Why bother?

Divisional Manager Ciara Connolly who oversees our accounting, finance and office support divisions addresses some of misconceptions businesses may have about hiring a temp.

Obviously, as a recruitment agency specialising in temporary recruitment, we love temps. But as our temp division has grown across office support, accounting and finance alongside healthcare, catering and industrial, we have encountered many businesses who initially can’t see how temps can benefit their business. Well, I’m here to tell you how!

Business peaks and pits

Every business experiences peaks in demand or the need to cover absences, now more than ever! With higher numbers of staff having to quarantine due to contracting Covid or being a close contact, employers are left with the headache of how to quickly fill such short-term gaps. Outside of filling absences, with the wider market so difficult to predict, it makes sense for a business to utilise short-term hirings for busy periods and short term projects. With no-one knowing quite what the next few weeks/months look like in terms of restrictions, engaging with a temp workforce is ideal. It gives employers the freedom to scale staff levels up and down as requirements shift in the current global climate.

React quickly

98% of all temporary bookings are filled within a 24-hour turnaround, making it an ideal in the present climate as restrictions change quickly and staff may be unavailable at short notice. But with Excel, you don’t just get staff quickly, you get qualified staff quickly. Whether its accounts or administration staff with strong excel or sage experience or temporary workers already set up to work from home if your office is currently closed, tell us what you need and when you need it. The rest is up to us to deliver. And we do.

Honeymoon period

Having the ability to pick up the phone and get qualified, professional staff at short notice in fantastic for any business but temp staffing also works as a longterm hiring tool. By using temps, it allows you to identify talented staff that fit well within your company culture without undertaking a lengthy recruitment drive. Temp working allows employers and candidates alike to see if there is a good fit before committing to a permanent role.

Here at Excel Recruitment, we are a leading provider of flexible temporary staff. Contact Ciara Connolly, Divisional Manager on 045 397142 or email ciara@excelrecruitment.com to discuss your temporary staffing needs in administration, accounting, finance and customer support.

Agency workers prop up healthcare system, only to be forgotten at vaccine time

To begin by stating the obvious: COVID is still with us and in the words of the WHO’s David Nabarro; “This pandemic is nowhere near finished”. That being said, the promise of further vaccine arrivals over the coming months has provided hope of a more stable ‘new normal’. The focus of the conversation is now turning to how we compensate our front line workers for what they have gone through over the past twelve months and the challenges that they will continue to face for the foreseeable future.

But what was noticeably missing from any of the conversations has been the role of agency care assistants, nurses and doctors. When the vaccine rollout began at the start of the year, no-one, including the HSE, could give agency staff a definitive answer as to where and when they could access their vaccines. Private care homes presumed the HSE would oversee it, the HSE possibly presumed the private care homes would oversee it and all the while the staff, the very people who have been on the frontlines of tackling COVID and protecting our most vulnerable citizens since the beginning, were left in limbo. This is despite several attempts by our management to engage directly with the HSE on this matter.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new nor is the negative press so often associated with agency front line workers. Healthcare professionals often choose the agency route to pick up some extra work but most find temporary shifts because it suits their lifestyle as they are unable to commit to a permanent job and schedule due to family or other commitments. But they have the same professional requirements, dedication and compassion and are regulated in the same way.

Recently, in a briefing for the Cabinet Committee on Covid-19, the HSE warned it may be unable to provide any more public health service staff to private nursing homes if they’re hit by new outbreaks of coronavirus. But this isn’t how healthcare units have been managing in real-time. In truth, it is no exaggeration to say agency staff have played a vital role in maintaining the entire country’s healthcare system both private and public since last March.

Agency support staff were often those called into facilities during the darkest periods of outbreaks, covering the provider’s own staff who were out due to being a close contact or having contracted the virus themselves. We are incredibly humbled by the agency nurses and carers who have willingly put themselves into difficult situations and moving on to do the same in a new nursing home once the outbreak had abated and permanent staff had returned to work. There have been so many frontline workers who have pulled us through the pandemic and the contribution of agency healthcare staff across many disciplines cannot be overlooked.

Ask yourself this question how many more lives would have been lost and how could our health system have coped without the tens of thousands of agency healthcare workers and recruiters that have worked tirelessly since this pandemic started?