Top Tips For Managing your Contractors

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

Here are some of our Top Tips for managing your Contractors in Firefish to ensure quicker placements and the best candidate experience.

As a Contract recruiter, whether it’s high volume or specialist roles, 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:

• Compliance Details –If your roles require Contractors to have certain certificates or qualifications or compliance information, getting this as early as possible for you’re your candidates means that you can place them much quicker, especially for those immediate start roles! Check out our Top Tips for managing your candidates compliance

• Pay – Some of your Contractors you may regularly place in another role once their contract has ended, always ensure that their payment details are up to date, including the pay method and Frequency along with their pay Type such as LTD Company, Umbrella or Self Employed and the account details to avoid any errors when it comes to paying your candidates. You can also use the Supplier Directory to build up a list of commonly used Umbrella Companies.

• SMS / Email Marketing – 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.

• Availability – 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.

Job Workflow

Decide what information you need for your Contract Jobs and configure your Contract Workflow settings correctly with all the required information, especially if you are using Timesheet Portal.

Below are some key fields and settings that you may need for Contract Jobs:

• IR35

• Level of compliance required

• Default pay type (LTD or PAYE)

• Raye type (Hourly or Daily)

• Additional Rates

• Job authorisation

• Timesheet authoriser

Contractor Aftercare

Once your Contractor has been successfully placed in their new role, regularly checking in with both your client and your candidate to see how they are getting on is a good way to build and maintain strong relationships and ensure everything is going well. This is also a great business development opportunity to find out about any other roles or coming up within your clients business.

Using the Current Contracts on your Dashboards Quick Links, provides as easy overview of all your current Contractors including how long they have left of their contract.

Once your candidate 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 contract.

For our best practise on managing your Temps, check out this article here!