temp job agencies- going permanent

brightonman123

got a job through temp agency 'A', and the firm I am at advertised themselves for permanent position. which i applied for direct.

found oud that the agency wanted 20% temp to perm fee as well, ON TOP of the £3 an hour they are already getting out of my hard work (40 hours a week = £120+VAT..)

and i wouldnt get a penny of it?!

cazziebo

You obviously know the pay rate, do you know the charge rate? Is that £3 on top of the oncosts such as employer's NI, holiday pay element etc?

Agencies carry employer's liability for their workers, and they are a business. They have to be paid for finding and retaining workers. They also have to manage difficult clients like me!

I use agencies a lot, and I don't object to reasonable fees because it is by far the most effective way for me to recruit in terms of time, effort and money.

brightonman123

the agency are chagring emplyer just over £3/hour,on top of what the pay me.

they stupidly included theie rate/contract letter that was meant to go to the employer, with the papers they sent me..

just smacks as being rather greedy. talking to the boss, he said would be bad for him doing somethine direct (a pretty tight contract with agency, it seems)

Glad

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Conor_3

brightonman123 wrote: »

the agency are chagring emplyer just over £3/hour,on top of what the pay me.

they stupidly included theie rate/contract letter that was meant to go to the employer, with the papers they sent me..

just smacks as being rather greedy. talking to the boss, he said would be bad for him doing somethine direct (a pretty tight contract with agency, it seems)

Of course it's not being greedy. You obviously don't know how pay works so I'll explain.

On top of your hourly rate, it costs an employer 12.5% of your gross in Employers NI contributions and another 10% as Statutory Holiday pay so the actual cost to the agency to employ you is 22.5% above your gross wage.

So, if you were on £7/hr, it actually costs the agency £8.58/hr. If they're charging you out at £10/hr, they have £1.42 to go towards running a city centre office with all the rates, electric, gas, phone IT and staffing costs. When you think it can cost over £400 a week just in office rent and rates, the profit from at least 10 employees doing a 40 hour week goes on just that. You can reckon on the profit of 30-40 fulltime agency employees just covering overheads alone.

Also, clients are notorious for not paying their agency bills or taking an age to do it. My friend ran a small agency and ended up bankrupt because he wasn't getting paid from the companies he supplied and some paid on 60 day terms yet he had 30 staff who expected their wages every week.

Agencies quite rightly charge companies for taking you on as a recruitment fee. At the end of the day, they've got to be compensated for the profit they'll lose from the time you would possibly have spent with them had you not gone permanent.

It's far from money for old rope, believe me.

And at the end of the day, if you're good at what you do and companies ask the agency for you by name, you can always do what I did which is go self employed and charge the company the same/nearly the same as the agency was and have some of that money you think you're being done out of.

liney

As a general rule of thumb, agencies have a 6 month safety net period whereby if you work as a temp you cannot be taken permanent (except from their temp to perm scheme) at a company for 6 months after you leave the temp job at the firm without being subject to a fee.

Connor is correct in his information above, and you have to consider that many temps apply for vacancies internally which they would never have been privy to see if the agency hadn't put them there in the first place.

My advice would be to find out what the agencies temp to perm scheme is, ie the period of time you work before the company can take you without incurring a transfer fee, and ask your boss if he would consider keeping you for the remainder of this and offering you the position at this point, thus not costing the client a transfer fee. This would of course assume they want to give you the job and are not using the fee as a reason not to.

Conor_3

Just to add to this that at one agency I was with, I was offered a chance to get taken on permanently with a company I'd been at for nearly a year but they didn't want to pay the agency a premium. I mentioned how much I really wanted to do this to the agency and they agreed to waive the fee and faxed a letter to the company confirming this so they can be flexible. This tends to happen more with clients that give them a lot of business.

LittleVoice

Conor wrote: »

. . . go self employed and charge the company the same/nearly the same as the agency was and have some of that money you think you're being done out of.

Hi, Conor - Didn't this still fall foul of the agency/employer agreement? Or did you just keep quiet?

Conor_3

No it doesn't fall foul. They're not employing you - they're employing the services of your company in a business relationship with your company.

I made a point of telling the particular agency at the time I was doing this as I did it completely out of revenge motivation as things weren't going that well with them and I wanted them to know it was me and I was going to make sure their attitude to me lost them £900 a week business.

To get around IR35 restrictions, set yourself up as a personal service company.