Temp jobs

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m a grad student. Throughout the academic year, I subsist on a teaching assistantship. It doesn’t pay me a lot, but I do well enough to be more or less content. (I’m sure if I had kids to support, I’d feel a lot less complacent.)

But summer’s coming, and, since I’m not supported by a research grant, I have no idea if I’m going to have work from the university or not. I’ve decided to be proactive about this problem and start looking for summer jobs outside my usual perch in the ivory tower.

Here’s the problem–judging from the tons of classified ads and jobs listings I’ve waded through by now, I have absolutely no useful job skills whatsoever. I’m a little surprised to discover this fundamental truth. After all, I’ve got a basic knowledge of statistics and experimental design, I know a bunch of stuff about the ecology of the region I live in, and I work on the side translating documents from Spanish and Portuguese to English. I wrote the application for the grant that paid for the materials and mileage used in my research, and I used to do grants administration for the state I live in. Oddly enough, though, none of this seems to add up to anything anyone wants to hire.

Since I really, really, really don’t want to be bringing home a whopping $6.50/hr flipping burgers, I’m going to be talking to temp agencies very soon. I’ve worked for temp agencies before, and I know that, when you fill out the application, they always want to know the absolute lowest wage you’re willing to recieve.

So, after all the above rambling, here’s the question–how much cash per hour should I ask for? If I ask for too little, I’ll end up with a crap job, earning dirtballs. If I ask for too much, I’ll never get hired. What pay range do you suggest?

Also–does anyone have any tips on getting good jobs from a temp agency?

I’d appreciate any advice you fellow Teeming Millions could give me.

2

The minimum is not that important, really. They’ll always tell you what the job pays before you accept it. I would suggest 10 bucks as a minimum - but you will probably average $12. Assuming 35 hours per week (9-5 with one hour lunch) you’ll be making $300 - $350 a week.

There’s no real tip to getting good jobs with the temp agency. Basically, you won’t get any. Some will be less boring than others, but most will be AA/receptionist/or something along those lines. I would call every other day until you get a job. A lot of times, there is no real priority list and if they hear from you that day and you are in their mind, they’ll give you the job. Do a really great job on your first one and be consistently good and you’ll continue getting the choicer jobs since they’ll trust you more.

3

I’ll second Neurotik, its been years since I temped, so I have no idea what the going rate is…but a dozen years ago I made between $7 to $12 an hour.

Register with a few agencies. Get dressed every morning and give them a call. “I’m ready to go, do you have anything for me?” Often you’ll get the last call that came in - and if nothing else, you’ll get a reputation as either a go getter (a good rep to have with the agency) or a pest who they need to assign a job to or you’ll call them every day (not necessarily a bad rep, from a purely selfish point of view). Don’t be picky - especially about your first placements. Its better to earn $10 an hour staring at your hands than nothing staring at your hands.

4

When I was temping earlier this year, I set a $10.00 an hour minimum because of a long career and good office skills, but I accepted a job for $6.25 an hour for an afternoon’s work. That last one was interesting, and kind of fun.

I’d say you might want to consider setting a minimum of $8.00 an hour, especially if the temp market’s tight. Adecco has been good to me in the past, although they let me down this time around. You might also want to check out smaller, independent temp agencies. One of those was the one which brought me all the assignments I got before I got my new job.

Don’t underestimate yourself. From what you’ve said in the OP, it sounds like you can answer the telephone politely, work basic office equipment, type reasonably well, and use a computer. Those are good, basic office skills. Stress the grant application and the statistical and experimental design work. If you can, brush up on your skill with Microsoft Office. All but one of the temp agencies I went to put me through a computerized test of how much I knew about two or three MS Office products, usually Access, Excel, and Word, although I was also tested on Powerpoint. Don’t forget to cover the basic stuff, and don’t rely too much on short cuts – they don’t always work. I can also pretty much guarantee that you will be given a typing test and possibly a data entry test. Doing well on those can lead to good assignments, although I don’t think data entry pays that well. It certainly didn’t eight years ago.

Good luck! I don’t blame you for temping – it’s a lot more fun than standard customer service jobs, and it does give you a few extra qualifications to add to your resume. Keep in mind that you will still be dealing with the public and, if you can successfully charm a client, you might wind up working for them on a regular basis. It’s worked for me.

CJ

5

Scribble-

Have you tried Kelly Scientific? Plus, if you can do all this translating, have you contacted the nearest Spanish/Portuguese/South American consulate/embassy?

Remember, a huge number of jobs never get listed in the want ads. In bad times, small companies with very specific job needs may not always put out an ad, for fear of having to devote resources to wading through the resumes of a bunch of unqualified people who sent them in “just in case”.

Try to think of what sort of company might have use the skills you do have, call them up, and see if they’re hiring for the summer. You might get a surprise.

6

I am working for a temp agency at the moment. I can tell you that the market is very tight right now, at least in my area. The jobs a very hard to come by even though I have experience and test very well on computer programs.

When I applied, I list $8 as the minimum I would accept, mostly because I need work enough that I don’t want to be passed over on anything reasonable. Though usually I make at least $10 an hour, it’s worth it to me to be open to less.

If you are somewhat fluent in speaking and understanding Spanish and Portuguese, I would point this out to the agency. This can add an additional $2 an hour to any receptionist position that needs a bilingual person to fill the position and gives you a great advantage over other temps at the agency. I’d also list all the MS Office programs that you can work with and spend time learning the basics of the ones you don’t so that you can test for them.

I think that it is a good move to apply with a temp agency. It opens up opportunities for you. You can keep looking for other summer positions, but it doesn’t hurt to have a back up plan that will land you jobs making more than minimum wage.

I would also stop by the unemployment agency where you live. State and federal paid jobs are required to be listed there and often aren’t listed in the paper. It will also give you an idea of some companies to contact about summer employment that may be closer to your experience. It never hurts to call and ask or to even propose a paid internship to a company. You may be able to “create” the perfect summer opportunity for yourself.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do this summer.

7

It just so happens, I’m general manager of a company that is a subsidiary of one of the largest temp services in the world. I can’t mention the name, but let’s just say that I’m a MAN and in this company I have a lot of POWER.

My staff is 95% temps, which I hire thru the “mother ship”. I currently pay $6.50 for unskilled labor and the bitch of it is that I’m getting underpriced by my competition left and right. Unfortunately for the American worker, our lifestyles, no matter how meager they may seem, often price us out of the market for unskilled labor positions. Immigrants, be they Mexican, Haitian, Cuban, Bosnian, whatever, are always willing to work for less. They live in large extended families and all of them will work for the same place. They split rent and transportation 10-12 ways, never go out, cook all their food by hand, and have no life and two or three jobs. This allows them to work for much less than the competition (you), even tho I’m willing to bet that your lifestyle is probably pretty meager by American standards.

Please don’t think I’m insulting immigrants. Quite the opposite.

Your best bet is to capitalize on your skills, and the one that jumped out at me was the Spanish. Good translators are hard to find, and Spanish especially is in high demand. Someone suggested applying to the consulate, and I dunno, that might work. My recommendation would be to shoot a little lower and more locally probably. If you would be cool doing labor relations type work, i.e. explaining to Mexicans about their jobs, insurance, social services, etc., I’ll bet you could have a job paying above average for a temp by the end of the day. For every consulate, there’s probably 100 factories or government agencies that deal with non-english speakers as a matter of everyday business. I’d look there if I was you.

8

Another temp checking in. I live in Canada so can’t relate re: hourly rates but I can pass on a bit of advice I’ve recieved. I’d appreciate any comments re: the validity of this advice, though !

See, the employer pays the agency a set rate for you (usually, here, about $25/hr). The agency uses its discretion as to how much to pay you. If you say you’ll work for $10, they’ll pay you $10. If you say you’ll work for $15, they’ll pay you $15. If they really can’t pay you that much, they’ll say so. At my current placement, someone suggested to me that I call the agency and ask for a raise (since I know for sure that they are paying me less than they paid the last person who had this position - even though the agency gets the same rate from the employer) since my boss would never consent to having to find a replacement for me. I haven’t done it yet, but one of my co-workers is leaving so soon I will have to take on more responsibilities. Any advice?

The other thing I’ve learned re: skills - they really don’t seem to matter. I have super MS Office skills and type 75 wpm and honestly, I have never ever used more than basic skills in a temp job. What they want is office skills: being polite on the phone, taking orders, doing filing without complaining, not being afraid to open the photocopier to un-jam it, etc. More than once I’ve left a job and trained a replacement whose skills were nowhere near mine - but they got the same position ! (They were probably paid less, though.)

9

Thanks for all your stories and advice!

I’ve not applied to any of the temp agencies yet, since Spring Quarter has just started. I’m in the midst of getting my schedule straightened out. But by next week, I’ll be putting in my applications and sending off those resumes.

I don’t know how tight the market is where I am, cjhoward. But it seems logical to assume that it’s not as un-tight (loose?) as it used to be. Our unemployment rates are up, and everyone’s cutting costs.

Scotandrsn–I hadn’t even considered consulates as employers; there aren’t any where I am, AFAIK. I’ve been told that consulates and government offices won’t hire anyone without certification in translation. I have absolutely no formal qualifications in translation whatsoever. I don’t even have a degree in Spanish or Portuguese.

I see no reason not to send out some resumes and cover letters, though. The worst that could happen is that I’d lose some money in printing and postage. I do know that some of the official translations are absolutely pathetic. <disclaimer> That’s not to imply that Dopers or Dopers’ friends, relatives, etc. who work as translators for government offices are incompetent. All I know is that the official translations I’ve seen–and my sample size is on the small side–left much to be desired.</disclaimer>

And thanks for reminding me to look beyond the classifieds. It’s easy to forget basic stuff like that when you’re feeling discouraged. :slight_smile:

Nor have I checked out the unemployment office yet, Kithara. That sounds like a good idea, too.

Metalhead–thanks for your insights into the inner workings of temp agencies.

My spoken Spanish is OK, but not stellar (I have proficiency, but not native-level fluency, and I can get tripped up by regional slang and terms, expressions, and constructions of some Carribean dialects.) My vocabulary doesn’t really include words like “deductible,” or “co-pay,” in Spanish (and, honestly, there’s lots about insurance, law, and social service stuff I don’t know about in English) so I’m not sure how good I’d be at explaining the ins and outs of benefits policies in any language. My spoken Portuguese is rudimentary at best. But maybe I could do basic translation work of incoming workers’ documents or health records.

Side note: That’s the main advantage of doing written translations–you can hunt through dictionaries, websites, or other sources until you find out what the best translation would be for any given word or phrase. This comes in very handy when you need to work with, say, abbreviations for accounting regulations a Buenos Aires widget producer is supposed to follow. I’d be completely out of my depth if I were to try simultaneous interpretation in a discussion about legal or insurance stuff.

Cowgirl–Yeah, I always suspected that the higher you set your minimum acceptable pay, the higher your starting wage will be. But I’m too cowardly (i.e., too afraid of ending up with nothing) to ask for more than US$10/hr. Thanks for mentioning the photocopier; I’ll make sure to tell the agencies that I used to work as an on-call laser printer repair person. That job sucked big time, but if it gets me hired, I’ll be glad I did it. Fixing printers still beats saying “Paper or plastic?” for $6.00/hr.

Dangerosa–Persistence seems like a good idea to me, too. Thanks for the tip.

Neurotik–Yeah…my experience hasn’t been that temp jobs are tons of fun, either. But it does indeed beat the dreaded customer service.

To everyone who suggested that I get nice ‘n’ cozy with Microsoft Office–Thanks. I’ve worked with it somewhat, but I’ve never had any real need for lots of the fancy stuff MO can do. I’ll brush up on it as best I can in the next few weeks.

10

Crap. And I misspelled cjhowarth’s name.

Preview is your friend…Preview is your friend…

Well, I guess I can’t honestly say that I’m too detail-oriented, now, can I?

11

It depends a lot on where you are. In San Francisco in 1996 and no marketable skills, I was making $10-15/hour. I said $10 was my minimum and they paid me at least that. One time I made $10 for stuffing envelopes when everyone else was making minimum wage. I discovered the temp agencies make a lot of money off you and can afford to pay you more if you insist. It was pretty easy to get raises if I stayed at the same place and my employer liked me.