Can they fog a mirror? Yes? then hire them. Geez. Youre not hiring for a FT career.
What’s the problem with asking for references? I mean, I hate it too, but when I’ve hired (babysitters/nannies), I’ve found this to be THE best screen for reliability, and it’s really only an extra 5-10 minutes added to the process.
The main relevant questions I’ve asked:
-Can you tell me about this person’s responsibilities at your job? [This is to get them going and also to glean information about what kinds of things the person is used to doing and how much responsibility they’ve had in the past.]
-Is this person dependable? Does s/he show up on time? [This isn’t something I would necessarily ask of an older person’s reference for, say, a white-collar engineer job, but for a younger college-age kid, yeah, just ask directly!]
-Are there any issues you had with this person that it would be helpful for me to know about? [This has been really useful for me, because usually people will try to come up with something negative to say, because they want to try to answer the question. Something like “doesn’t work well independently,” for instance, would be a good answer for you, because you don’t care about that, and if this person were unreliable they’d probably mention that before independent work.]
Count me in as confused as to how “2 week gig”, “reliable”, and “I interview the temp workers” all goes together logically. First thing’s first, you’re not going to find anyone reliable for a 2 week gig, precisely because it is a 2 week gig. You get what you give. You’re not reliable employment so you won’t find reliable employees (and if you do they’ll only be temporarily available, or they’ll be fools). That being said, there’s people trying to work their way up and out through the system and they utilize temp agencies to get back on their feet on the way to a full time job. You definitely don’t have the time or resources to fully interview someone for only a 2 week stint. You don’t get enough out of it to make it worth the effort. So, let the agencies do it for you. They at least expect returns by being able to take that one interview to farm the person out to 20 different multi-week gigs before they get their full time job and wave goodbye.
I don’t think that’s true.
I think probably the issue is that this job isn’t paid enough to attract professionals.
It’s pretty easy to book people for a gig that lasts only a few hours and have them reliably show up. There are lots of independent contractors of all sorts that you can hire this way. You just have to pay enough that it’s worth their time.
This post is stupid.
There’s nothing wrong with it, I just hate being those people with a laundry list of requirements for an easy, short-term gig. We don’t ask for college degrees, we don’t have eight rounds of interviews, we don’t require retina eye scans. Even though the job is easy, people are really stupid sometimes, so we’ve been screening for basic competence and a personable nature (it’s a people job). So far so good with those two! Generally speaking, we’re good with folks showing up, but it’s so problematic when they don’t that it’s an issue we really need to figure out a better solution for. One person, for example, gave notice (albeit short) and missed one day of a month-long gig. Don’t love it, but I can live with it. Shit happens. I can’t live with someone who just doesn’t do their work and you find out afterward. Come on!
References can for sure help weed out flakes. I also like the idea of not hiring goddamn kids anymore or having a temp agency screen for us.
We’re not offering professional-grade pay because we’re not offering professional-grade work. We’re paying $20/hr for a fair simple, short-term gig. That’s more money than they’re going to make stocking shelves, but less money than an actual adult with a career would expect to make. I think it’s fair.
And yeah, I don’t think it’s impossible to find good people for temp work. Harder than it would be for a real job, sure, but the people we find are mainly good. We’ll never make 100% perfect hires, but I feel like with some changes to our process we can get closer to that number than where we are. I hope!
How to screen for reliability in a employer? Dont work here. Youre not offering reliability, now are you?
I used to hire people for short gigs in a corporate setting. Get. A. Temp. Agency.
The extra amount you pay is peanuts compared to the potential fallout for hiring a flake.
The agency screens for you.
There really isn’t any incentive for the temp to perform well but there is a larger incentive for an agency because they get repeat business.
The agency will know the track records of the people they send.
Don’t nickel and dime it. Your sales and repeat business is worth so much more. Pay a little above going rate and get s good person.
If for some reason the temp flakes, the agency is in a much better position to find an emergency replacement.
Get the reliable people that you do find to give you the names of friends they know that may be interested. Even Google gives weight to recommendations from current and former Googlers.
I think the agency route is probably your best bet - but I also liked the suggestion of getting them to call you with information at a particular time on a particular day. Shows that at least they’re interested enough in the job to make that effort, and able to calculate timezones sufficiently to do that.
I don’t agree with those who are saying that you can’t expect decent employees if all you’re offering is a two-week contract. Maybe this is something that varies by location, but that’s exactly the sort of thing temp agencies in London (which is where I’ve worked with temps) offer, and the people who worked with us were reliable and good at what we asked them to do. And expecting people to show up - preferably on time - isn’t exactly asking for the moon. Good luck!
I’ve also seen people use that kind of jobs as a way to start building a work history, or getting back into the workforce. “Is willing to take short term jobs” doesn’t necessarily equal “can’t stay put for five minutes”.
Look at it from the employees perspective. There are two kinds of employees who are going to do short term temp work.
- Those who are looking for something more stable and putting together gigs to get by
- Those who want the flexibility.
For the first, if they get a job interview during your two weeks, they are going to go to it. Your gig is two weeks, they need to think about the next two. Heck, if their friend calls and needs help finding their dog, they are going to go - their friend is a long term proposition, you are a short term proposition. If they’ve been working gigs for long enough, they are a little jaded - so maybe they go to a movie because they are bored of your work. They may be stringing together multiple gigs - your two weeks assignment plus driving Uber plus dog walking. Dog walking may be the most stable thing in that mix, so guess what - Fido and Spot get walked on their deadline, even if that means they miss yours.
For the second - the stay at home mom is probably most typical. She does your job between kid duties. But mom is her primary job. So when the apple juice gets spilled all over the kitchen floor, or the tantrum starts, or the nap ends - she goes into mom mode - and your deadline slips. But other people who look for flexibility are students (if a big paper comes due or they didn’t plan for the amount of reading this week, you may be out of luck - and they do go to class).
I’d figure out who you’d like to take this job - what do they do with the rest of their time - other than turn down jobs at WalMart - why do they want your $20 an hour job - and then go after them. Is this a great job for students? Is it an awesome job for a retiree looking for a little extra income once in a while?
Also, it sounds like you have this job open often - two weeks now, and then in two months, another two weeks. Is there a target for freelancers who want two weeks here and there who would be willing to treat you more as a client and less like a temp job?
Two things:
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I think the temp agency route is the best idea for a lot of reasons. My only concern is convincing the owner to stop being a cheapskate and to put some actual dough into finding better people.
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The length of the gig varies by client, so even though I used two weeks as an example, not every gig is that length (people seem fixated on this number), and we hire for a single location once, which unfortunately means we can’t go back to our good folks for repeat work. I really wish we could because the great majority of our folks have done a good job, and we’d gladly go back to them. Sadly, with each a new location, it’s back to the drawing board.
If we don’t go through temp agencies (so I guess this is three things), I’m going to have to start considering work history more closely, or asking for references, or whatever solution we come up with. I also think having an alternate lined up is a really good idea. One that I actually wanted to do last time, as this was one of our longer gigs and losing someone in the middle would be a Big Fucking Deal, but someone didn’t think we needed it. We actually did need it and not having one turned out to be a thorn in our asses. But I’m not here to play “I told you so.” Not on the weekend. Weekends are for lovers.
I don’t hire people for my current job, but I do train them. I ask them if they know the three things they have to do to keep this job. If they do, fine. If they don’t, I tell them:
- Be here when you are scheduled.
- Do the work right.
- Get along with everyone.
If they can’t do that, they are fired.
Your other option may be a metric based completion bonus for good work. For example, pay $20 an hour, with a $100 bonus available every week if all work is completed by deadline, 100% of customer contact is achieved, etc. Pay the bonus once work is reviewed (i.e. not on the last day of the assignment.)
You’ll have to make sure the metrics are clear and well defined, and review the work - but it gives them some skin in the game for actually being reliable.
- Retirees.
I also say you should use a temp agency. If you can afford to pay $20 an hour, you can afford to do this.
My advice is figure out exactly how much time and money you’re spending (probably you personally) recruiting and interviewing and re-hiring, etc. Write down how many reputation-damaging flake-outs you’ve had. Then do the basic research of calling a couple temp agencies and finding out what they’d charge.
Now you can do the math for your boss (don’t forget that your benefits and such cost your company about half as much again as your direct salary) and say “Look, if the reputation damage from one flake-out is just $X, we save money by going with an agency” (or maybe even “Look, we’re spending more money on me hiring people than the temp agency would cost us”)
I found the bolded comment interesting. Why can’t the same person be used more than once? It’s one set-up per city, or something like that? Do you guys every a bunch of set-ups in the same location that one person could knock out?
If you can’t go through an agency, and so have to carry on interviewing, can you ask them questions to check their reliability? Direct stuff like “what do you do to make sure you turn up on time/meet deadlines/whatever the key thing is?” or “how do you prioritise your work to make sure you deliver on time?” Or similar…