It may be a sign of the difficult times we’ve been through of late: a recent poll indicates that 23% of employers are seeing internship applications from mature, experienced workers, people who are pursuing the same positions as college students.  Internships obviously provide jobseekers with a way to “audition” for permanent roles, and give them a chance to pick up new experience and skills.  Other indications from the survey?

Regardless of applicants’ ages, more than one-quarter (27 percent) of employers said they plan to hire interns during the remainder of 2010 to help support workloads. Fourteen percent said they anticipate hiring paid interns, while 7 percent said they won’t be paying their interns. An additional 5 percent said they will hire both paid and unpaid interns. Fifty-three percent of employers said they plan to pay interns $10 or more per hour, while 5 percent said they will pay $25 or more per hour.

Let’s be clear about the considerable distinctions between internships and temporary or contingent hiring: the latter usually require specific, established skills that are put to the job immediately tackling very imminent challenges.  Internships can provide support for permanent staff, but almost always not in the kind of jobs that are critical to a company’s core success.  Often, as the survey goes on to indicate, they’re in maintenance or errand-heavy roles, where they’re peripheral to real responsibilities.

As we’ve posted before, growth in the temporary services sector usually leads recovery in the permanent jobs market.  All told, about 379,000 temporary jobs have been added to the rolls since September of 2010, and growth in that area will probably continue — especially since employers are still hesitant about the recovery, and because there’s evidence that temporary and contingent staffing will be a larger and more permanent trend in employment going forward.

That said, there are still myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods out there that every temp candidate may have heard — and that should be dispelled with the facts.

Temp jobs are bottom-of-the-barrel: The truth is, many temp jobs are for specialized or general positions at middle and upper level of organizations, from legal to IT and beyond.  Temp hires aren’t always the “seat fillers” of the employment world, somehow comparable to migrant labor…nearly every job on the corporate org chart could be filled by a temporary hire.  Interestingly, one example is Ed Whitacre, the recent chairman of General Motors — he was strictly transitional in the job, coming on to get the company from Point A to Point B in its restructuring.  An extreme example?  Sure.  But it’s a honest example of the nature of a lot of temporary positions, as companies look for quality people to help them in specific situations.

Temp jobs aren’t challenging: See above.  Often, they’re among the most challenging in the organization, because they deal with circumstances that are unusual, and require skillsets that are lacking in the current staff, but are sorely needed — often in a hurry — to tackle the job at hand.

Temp jobs pay poorly: Quite commonly they pay better, at least on a cash-per-hour basis, than salaried jobs, because of the need for highly-qualified people to come in and immediately deal with significant challenges.   And employers often allow temporary and contingency employees to access the same benefits as their permanent staffers, which can even include skills training programs.

Don’t put them on the resume: On the contrary, a jobseeker should definitely include temporary positions on their credentials, if only for the sake of honesty.  And if they worked in a skilled or specialty position where you attacked special challenges, there’s absolutely no reason you should exclude that experience!

Temp job seekers pay fees to work with a staffing firm: Respectable staffing firms never charge candidates, because fees are covered by their client companies.

Temp work will get in the way of finding permanent work: It’s almost the opposite — not only does temp work provide flexibility, in many cases, that lets you devote time to pursuing a permanent job, but many employers use temporary positions as a way to audit candidates for full-time roles.

It’s unfortunate if any of these assumptions keeps even one good prospect out of the candidate pool.  So part of  the job of a good recruitment professional is to help dispel these kinds of assumptions about temporary employment, and make sure a truer picture is shown.

Based on our own experience at North Bridge and some of the best practices at large in the recruitment and staffing industry, these are some pretty worthy tips for any organization looking to bring on temporary or contingent employees.

One good rule of thumb, to start?  Approach temp hiring with the same standards and expectations you’d have in mind if you were looking for permanent employees.  Your business deserves the best possible people on staff, regardless of how long they’ll be on the team!

1. Know thy market: the depth of talent in a given category can vary greatly market-to-market; a national surplus of widget engineers doesn’t necessarily mean your area has the same profile.  Work with your staffing firm to make sure you know the real availability of the types of role players you need, or may soon need, so you’ve got a true picture of how long it will take to land the talent you want so you can project accordingly.
2. Be precise with your recruiting firm in terms of skillsets you need, and the salary range you’ll offer.  That will obviously help narrow the field to candidates you can really afford – and will save you considerable time, of course.
3. Move it or lose it, because even in times like these, the best candidates go first – and you’d better be prepared to get in front of them quickly and decisively, whether they’re temporary or permanent hires.
4. Set benchmarks for what constitutes success for your temps, just as surely as you would for a full-time hire.  Measure their contribution: it’s surprising how many businesses think there’s some sort of efficiency in throwing people at a task or problem simply because they’re temporaries.  It’s still money ill-spent if you’re not auditing results.
5. Ask around: get perspective from others in the organization about how a temp could be put to work on its behalf.  There may be needs beyond the obvious assignment where an interim hire could make an impact, especially if they’ve got specific expertise that could benefit different facets of your enterprise.
6. Let the recruiter inside your organization, so they can have a good handle on its organization, culture, expectations and projects.  The time you spend indoctrinating a recruiter will pay off in better candidates.
7. Vette your recruiters thoroughly, because just as in any business, there are good and not-so-good providers out there.  There’s absolutely no substitute for the due diligence and quality of service you clearly find in a good recruiter – and they should be proud to offer up referrals who’ll testify to that!

The economic recover may be struggling a bit as it tries to gain traction, but it doesn’t seem to deter “job hoppers” like those profiled in this RedEye article, predominantly young people who have come to believe that transient, temporary jobs are the desired norm, and that the old paradigm of lifetime employment may be obsolete.  As Lindsey Pollak, author of “Getting from College to Career” puts it:

“The whole paradigm of how we work is completely changing. That old model of get one job out of college till you retire with a gold watch is completely, utterly gone.”

This new workforce — educated, highly mobile, not just accepting of transitional or temporary employment but sometimes even enthusiastic in their adoption of it — makes for a dynamic and vibrant new labor pool for hiring firms and staffing departments to take into consideration.

There are various theories as to why the jobs picture hasn’t been as positive as some have hoped.  The most recent unemployment figures posted by the government show only a modest improvement.  That’s largely because employers — and consumers — don’t entirely trust the recovery that seems to be underway, and are wary about spending — which means companies have to keep it lean and mean.

For staffing and recruitment firms, it obviously means embracing strategies that let them meet employers’ needs for highly-qualified and capable people who must fit into temporary or qualified positions.   But they also need to be mindful of the fact that the picture may change — upward or, unfortunately, downwards (if there’s a “double dip” recession), and they’ll have to make the corresponding changes right in stride in order to stay competitive!

In the past three months, more people quit their jobs than were laid off…and it’s a good sign for the economy that it’s happening. As recruitment and jobs experts who spoke with The Christian Science Monitor pointed out…

In general, that’s a sign of better economic times,” says Donald Siegel, dean of the school of business at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York. “I interpret it as a sign of an improving job market … when people feel confident enough to quit their jobs.

It’s yet another sign the jobs market is making upward headway: the number of jobs for recruitment professionals is apparently on the rise, after a couple of rocky years.

In many cases, companies that downsized their staffing and recruitment capabilities are now trying to “re-build capacity and expertise quickly,” as one expert puts it.

One of the negative impacts of the downturn, for those companies and staffing firms that elected to cut personnel, is the loss of valuable expertise that’s a difficult commodity to come by even in healthy times.  It’s one of the reason North Bridge Staffing is glad to say we came through the past couple of years in relatively good shape, thanks to the quality of our team and the foresight of our clients.

The jobs market has improved, but it’s still no walk in the park for college graduates.   One survey found that slightly over 24% of grads had a job waiting for them – up from 19% the year before.

Much of that hiring is apparently not permanent, as firms are still treading carefully: temporary and contract hires make up a fair share of the new jobs grads are finding.

As one graduate put it, “The tendency that I’ve seen among my friends is for someone to get a job, but it’s a yearlong contract for a project.  Then they expect to lay off the people they hired for the project, so within the year they’re going to be looking again for another job.”

These grads may be in the vanguard of a new model for the job market, where “permalancing” and conditional employment is more the norm, rather than the exception.  The jobs market of tomorrow may demand more and more flexibility of this kind from employers and employees alike, which will make the expertise of recruiters and staffing professionals more crucial than ever, linking the best prospects, companies, screening processes and connective technologies together like never before.

The American Staffing Association provides tremendous resources for its members, like its programs for helping reduce the legal liabilities and risks that confront staffing and recruitment firms as they conduct their business.

Each member staffing professional can use the ASA’s  Certified Staffing Professional™ and Technical Services Certified™ programs.  These enhance the knowledge and competency of professionals who interact with candidates, employees, and clients.

It’s critical to understand employment and labor law in the state or states where an employer or recruiter operates.  These ASA programs and professional certification exams test the staffing professional on federal and state employment and labor law, with state-specific workbooks to help bone up on each state’s regulations.

Excerpts from the federal workbook and a sample state workbook, and information about how certification can give your firm a competitive edge, are available at americanstaffing.net.

More and more indicators show that there’s a steady gain in hiring by U.S. companies.  A large share of that is in temps and temp-to-hire positions, which is the typical trend when a recovery is underway.

The one significant change from prior years may be that many of those positions are not only contingent, but will in all likelihood stay that way, according to many experts.  That’s because a new model is taking hold in the workplace, for better or worse, which is one where a larger share of a company’s labor force is strictly contingent.  As this article points out,

…many business groups and labor advocates believe the contingency work force is on the rise and will become a mainstay in the U.S. companies even after economic hard times are behind us.

There is, obviously, a lot of debate about the impact of this change, and its long-range impact on workers, consumers and the economy.  But it’s apparent to any businessperson that the flexibility and thrift of temp and temp-to-hire employment options help them stay competitive at a time when the pressures and costs of doing business don’t make that a simple task.