Employee Onboarding for Temporary Staff: a Quick Checklist
1. Don’t wait. Be proactive.
The first step of successful onboarding is to be proactive – start gathering together a pool of motivated and qualified people before you need them. Opportunities during the Coronavirus pandemic and after are incredibly precious and you need to be ready for them from whatever direction they come from.
With PARiM you can start building a staff pool that reflects the flexible times we live in from Day One. You not only save on costs with our pay-as-you-go model but with our Professional plan you can build an unlimited staff pool with all the required HR information and define custom employment types that fit your business and then assign people to your clients, locations and departments.
2. Document core skills and qualifications
Qualifications are your biggest point of leverage. Think of it this way: as end-consumers of services that temporary staff are employed to provide, our expectations regarding qualification and training are no different regardless of the type of employment. We expect someone employed only temporarily to be just as qualified as someone working in a location for years.
That is an important starting point both if you employ your staff or offer staff as a service. So at a bare minimum, it pays to document the most critical skills and qualifications your people have.
With PARiM you can do a lot more. From warnings when people lack specific skills to inviting people with only specific qualifications to apply for open shifts in mere seconds to sharing Saved Views of key people with unique skills across your management team – you not only get to have an unlimited pool of staff but to make most out of it.
3. Invite the right people to the right shifts
Now let's put the qualifications you have added into action. PARiM has a feature loved by hundreds of temporary staffing companies which we mentioned just above – something we call "Open Shifts" (click to learn more).
With it you can take a step towards a business where your best people get to work both when you need them and when they want to by inviting them to shifts they are more qualified or suited for.
It is incredibly simple for your staff.
4. Add a welcoming note when someone does their first shift
On their first day on the job even the most experienced people can get the jitters. Established and accepted processes can differ slightly between different organisations. In theory, having someone they can shadow on their first day to learn the ropes ought to help, but in practice – especially in temporary staffing – people often do not have the time or willingness to help others.
With PARiM, there's a way to help your first-timers: you can add notes to their shifts. Prepare a short template you can copy for each key location for new people: a cheerful welcoming message with a few of the best practices, key details of the job they are doing and whom to contact when they have questions. You can even add a link.
5. It all comes down to your tools
To sum up, in our digital age, employee onboarding revolves increasingly around modern, real-time HR data software. It not only helps your workers but also can facilitate improving your business.
Age-old software with static information acts as a poor substitute to paper and keeps you always a step behind as the data is not real-time, nor interconnected between different functionalities nor easily shareable between managers.
Importantly, pricing of conventional systems is even more of a problem as the dominant pricing models do not take into account the current dominant trends of flexible work and the gig economy. You often end up paying outrageous per-user pricing due to outdated pricing models.
We have built PARiM to solve these issues with data and costs for recruitment and staffing businesses just like yours. If you wish to learn more, we invite you to book a free demo.