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Temporary Staffing Is Not Job Hopping: Managers Take Note

We work with candidates all the time helping them position their work experience to the best advantage. Temporary staffing is not job hopping – it is continuity of role, at multiple companies. The obvious challenge is positioning a temporary staffing candidate effectively in their resume.

Consider the candidate that holds three assignments performing the same role during the year, for four months in duration. Is that 3 different jobs? which by many in HR would consider job hopping? or is that one single job?

The challenge is to show the next hiring manager (temporary staffing position, or full-time role) that the candidate is capable of performing the job. Let me say that again: the candidate is capable of performing the job!

We sometimes get lost, as hiring managers, recruiters and human resources professionals, when we eliminate a really great candidate because they held 3 jobs at 3 companies in one year. We forget that the research about employment is telling us the following:

  1. Long-term, pension-accruing jobs are gone. The average job duration of most jobs is (for 2012) 4.4 years, according to the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. For younger demographics, it is much lower, in the 1 to 2 year range. That is the norm.
  2. Job Search time in March of 2013 fell to 16 weeks, which is 1/3 of a year. According to Bloomberg, this is a drop from 25 weeks in 2010. This means many qualified applicants will have gaps in their resume – which incorrectly evaluated by perceptions set in the prior century, look like job hopping.
  3. By definition, temporary staffing employees are going to have a longer list of companies they have worked at, but this too should not be considered job hopping.

We (all people influencing hiring decisions) need to get better at digging deeper. We must look at the most important qualifiers for employees:

  1. Knowledge – do they have the knowledge, or aptitude for knowledge, to perform the job?
  2. Skills – from knowledge, have they developed, or can they readily develop the skills required to do the job?
  3. Experience – does past work experience demonstrates ability to take on and be successful in this job?
  4. Initiative – does the resume show the candidate takes initiative and therefore is going to be successful?
  5. Behavior – is there a pattern of effective workplace and job-related behavior?
  6. Attitude – a positive attitude wins over anyone with capabilities, but a cancerous negative attitude.

Note on Experience – this does not mean that the candidate has done the job before – it means they have demonstrated the aptitude to learn and be successful performing the job! Why?

  • There are not enough skilled candidates to find people that have 10 years of experience in any job these days.
  • And, it’s just plain wrong to think that any person that has done a job for 10 years (see the tenure statistics) is going to be happy doing that job again for any length of time. Employees are looking for growth too!

Hiring managers that don’t understand this are setting themselves up for automatic turnover, and eventual failure in building an organization that can thrive and deliver on the productivity and quality requirements and goals their company has for them.

Candidates – if you have read this far – you are a very desirable candidate. Now you know what you must do with your resume to position yourself for hiring managers to see your knowledge, skills, experience, initiative, behavior, and attitude as the traits they want on their team in their organization. Your resume is best written to show how you have grown through roles of progressively greater responsibility, and how you have been successful in delivering in those roles – even if the company for each role is different every 3 months.

Barton Staffing Solutions is focused on identifying and matching winning talent with client employers who want to achieve the result you can deliver. Fill out an application on our website today.

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