Top Tips For Managing your Temps

Our Best practice advice when managing temporary workers at each stage of the candidate lifecycle

As a Temp recruiter, working in a fast paced and reactive environment can often be challenging when trying to fill high volume bookings at short notice. Here are some of our Top Tips for managing your temps in Firefish.

As a temp recruiter, having a large bank of candidates who are ready to place at short notice is key to managing a busy desk successfully. Ensuring your candidates are fully compliant and engaged from the start will result in a smoother process and quicker placements.

Here are some key fields to help you manage your candidates record:

  • Availability โ€“ Knowing exactly what your candidates availability is, whether they have a notice period and if they are looking for Full Time / Part Time/ Evenings/ Weekends etc can help identify suitable candidates based on the required hours.

  • SMS / Email Marketing โ€“ Ensuring your candidates have opted in to SMS or Email marketing allows you to quickly send out communication in bulk to your available candidates to make them aware of any new roles which have just come in, resulting in quicker placements. For information on how to send a Bulk SMS or Bulk Email check out these articles.

  • Compliance Details โ€“ By ensuring your candidates are fully compliant as early as possible means that you place candidates much quicker, especially for those immediate start roles! Check out our Top Tips for managing your candidates compliance

  • Pay โ€“ If you have candidates that you regularly place in different jobs, always ensure that their payment details are up to date, including the pay Type, Method and Frequency along with the Account details to avoid any errors when it comes to paying your candidates.

Job Workflow


Decided what information to need for your Temp Jobs and ensure your workflow is set up correctly with all the required information, especially if you are using Timesheet Portal.

Below are some fields that you may need for Temp Jobs:

  • PO number

  • Level of compliance required

  • Additional Rates

  • Job authorisation

  • Timesheet authoriser

Temp Aftercare

Once your temp has been placed successfully, this doesnโ€™t mean the journey stops there! Regularly checking in with your candidate and client to see how they are getting on throughout the contract is a great way to continue to build strong relationships and ensure everything is going well. This is also a great business development opportunity to find out about any potential new vacancies coming up and any changes within your clients business.

Once your temp is nearing the end of their contract, you should be reaching out to your client to see if this is likely to be extended or whether the role will be coming to an end. This will then allow you start preparing for their extension or sourcing another position for them finishing their assignment. Before the end of your candidates contract, you should be asking your client for references where possible as this is a great tool for using to spec your candidates out to other potential clients.