5 Tips For Hiring Casual Labor

Hiring quality casual labor can be a big challenge for many companies and especially small businesses may struggle because they don´t have a dedicated recruitment team and therefore “recruiter” may just be one of the many hats someone wears. This makes it difficult to dedicate the proper time and energy to hiring casual labor and making sure you hire the best candidates for your vacancies. Also, as opposed to hiring permanent workers, usually less time and money is spent on hiring casual labor thereby making the recruitment process of less quality. Therefore, it can be difficult to make sure that not only the candidates with the right skills and backgrounds are selected, but also those with the best fit for the company.

 

Here are our 5 tips for hiring casual labor:

 

Make the job ad as clear and specific as possible

Your job ads should always be clear and specific but when it comes to hiring casual labor, this is extra important. Some of the advantages of hiring casual labor are the flexibility you will have, the speed to get someone onboard and the option to adjust your workforce to seasonal demand. However, this means you need to find the right fit because otherwise these benefits are lost with having to find someone else. Making your job ad as clear and specific as possible will help you avoid this.

 

Interview for independent team players

Since casual labor will be dropped in an already existing team for a temporary time, you need people that can adjust easily and are true team players. Therefore, focus your interviews on behavioral questioning that test for team playing, the ability to adapt to different environments and different teams on top of the skills that you are looking for. Also, since sometimes casual labor is less supervised and since they might not participate in the usual performance review cycles they might feel less committed. You will need to look for independent workers that are comfortable working in such a situation.

 

Recruit fast but with caution

As mentioned above, one of the benefits of casual labor is to have quick access to specialized skills that can meet your business´ demands at that moment. However, quickly doesn´t mean you should hire the first person coming by. Especially with casual labor you should hire with caution as well because the fit with the business and the team is important here to reap the benefits of this hire.

 

Make them part of the team from day 1

This is very important as well, in order to get good output from them and the rest of the team as fast as possible, make the casual labor you hire really part of the team from day 1. Don´t treat them too different or make very clear that they are temps, people that feel part of the team will deliver more value sooner.

 

Don´t let the rest of the team feel threatened

But, there´s another side to this as well. Make sure that your current team doesn´t feel threatened by the new arrival in any kind of way. It´s great that you could attract some very specific skills that you might not have in the team, but if you keep raving about that, current team members might get demotivated or disengaged thereby not delivering the best output. Hence, making casual labor part of the team from the beginning is one thing, but don´t put them above the team to also keep the rest of your workforce involved and engaged.

 

What are your best tips for hiring casual labor? We would love to read about it in the comments section!

 

 

 

 

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