what type of temp jobs will I expect from Agency?

Jomo

honeypop wrote: »

I am surprised at this lack of work available for admin temps, I had to arrange cover for me while I am on Maternity Leave, my position was Office Manager but the temp would be working on general day-to-day admin, making travel arrangements for staff, basic HR such as recording annual leave, sickness etc, basic finance such as logging invoices received and arranging payment. The role was for 7 months, for 3-5 days a week depending on what the candidate could do, and I expected to receive a LOT of CVs from the agencies.

What I got was maybe 10 CVs in total, not one of which was for anyone with office admin experience covering more than say 60% of what the job description/person spec covered. I honestly thought there would be loads of people with all these basic skills and experience looking for this type of role, especially as the days were flexible, but maybe it was the 7 month contract that put them off.

I would have thought temps would be the first to go in the current climate, before any redundancies were made.

I know somebody who is retraining due to the lack of any jobs out there in her field (Legal Secretary), she was made redundant and struggled to find any temp work.

Pee

So worth applying for something if you don't have the exact experience? A lot of temps have either had a secretarial role or are looking to start work in an office environment. I wouldn't expect a temping agency to be able to find someone with office management skills - even though the temp covering would not be doing your full role.

honeypop

Pee wrote: »

I wouldn't expect a temping agency to be able to find someone with office management skills - even though the temp covering would not be doing your full role.

Exactly, which is why the role was stripped down to be a basic administration role rather than office manager - still no 'good' candidates though.
On the other hand, before I started that job I was redundant and looking for similar temp work, but at that time there was a lot of competition for Office Manager roles and we were all having to look at more basic roles instead, but it seems to be the opposite now.

I'd say it's worth applying for something even if you don't have the exact experience, whether the agency put you forward for it is a different matter though I suppose.

honeypop

Jomo wrote: »

I would have thought temps would be the first to go in the current climate, before any redundancies were made.

I understand that, what I meant was I had a role to fill and apparently NO decent temps available to fill it. If there's so many looking for office admin roles, why couldn't I get a good one sent to me from an agency?

PasturesNew

honeypop wrote: »

I understand that, what I meant was I had a role to fill and apparently NO decent temps available to fill it. If there's so many looking for office admin roles, why couldn't I get a good one sent to me from an agency?

Not every person registers with every agency. There are 160 in my town. I stopped registering after the first 1-2 because it's long-winded (2 hours) and you might never hear from them again.

Jomo

honeypop wrote: »

I understand that, what I meant was I had a role to fill and apparently NO decent temps available to fill it. If there's so many looking for office admin roles, why couldn't I get a good one sent to me from an agency?

Maybe there was nothing wrong with the temps. Some roles aren't that easy to fill and certain knowledge is required, which can only be learnt on the job.

This was certainly the case in my last job and temps could only take on the simple, mundane tasks but were slowly introduced to everything else if they were there long enough.

Maybe you could have hired a temp a few weeks prior to the maternity leave so that they could be 'trained' properly.

chuckley

Ull be lucky if u get any correspondence from reed.

they are absolute trash.

honeypop

Jomo wrote: »

Maybe you could have hired a temp a few weeks prior to the maternity leave so that they could be 'trained' properly.

I did a 4 week handover/training period - I'm not that stupid!

I think you're missing my point, the role I had to fill was a basic office admin role, for which I know pretty much every administrator I've come across would have been able to cope with, nothing tricky or needing to be learnt, all simple day to day tasks you would encounter in any office. People seem to be saying there are more people looking for office admin roles than actual positions are available, so if there's this many spare people looking for this exact type of work, I wondered why the 2 biggest agencies in the town couldn't provide someone who had all these basic skills/knowledge for office admin work.

Anyway, so we had to go with the person who matched better than the others and make sure comprehensive training was given (although when I did this, it seemed she actually knew less than we thought as well, it was like training someone from scratch who had never worked in admin before!).

Jomo

honeypop wrote: »

I did a 4 week handover/training period - I'm not that stupid!

I think you're missing my point, the role I had to fill was a basic office admin role, for which I know pretty much every administrator I've come across would have been able to cope with, nothing tricky or needing to be learnt, all simple day to day tasks you would encounter in any office. People seem to be saying there are more people looking for office admin roles than actual positions are available, so if there's this many spare people looking for this exact type of work, I wondered why the 2 biggest agencies in the town couldn't provide someone who had all these basic skills/knowledge for office admin work.

Anyway, so we had to go with the person who matched better than the others and make sure comprehensive training was given (although when I did this, it seemed she actually knew less than we thought as well, it was like training someone from scratch who had never worked in admin before!).

Unfortunately there are those out there who will flower up their cv in order to get the job, all I can suggest is that you test their 'skills' thoroughly before you take them on, and maybe get on the blower to a few more agencies, there are plenty out there....:cool: