The changing hiring landscape in the U.S. has led many employers to turn to temporary staffing as a way to give workers experience before taking them on full time. This trend is expected to continue for some time, with about 58 percent of companies planning to use temporary employees of all experience levels in the next few years, according to the Harvard Business Review.
The news source reports that temporary employment is no longer just for warehouse workers, administrative staff and similar-level work. The new trend is shifting toward high-level people who are out of work and turning to temporary positions that earn them a paycheck similar to what they received in a traditional company.
This "free agent nation," as the HBR puts it, is home to several highly trained workers who are looking for temp work. Their credentials allow them to perform mission-critical work for companies that likely would have only been done by salaried employees in the past. The number of these workers is growing, and their sway could affect the business world as it is currently known.
Supertemps are typically able to avoid the corporate structure, such as meetings and office politics, which the news source says can consume as much as 40 percent of a worker's day. With more time, these workers can better focus on their tasks at hand, which may include developing a mergers and acquisitions strategy for a company, choosing information technology processes and other high-level decisions.
The media outlet states that the shift started when America began to recover from the Great Recession, as project-based work has become a viable option for talented or trained people who had trouble finding a job elsewhere. This could soon go one step further, with those talented workers opting to choose temporary work over full-time positions - a workforce model the news source says is slowly fading from view.
According to CBS News, while temporary staffing isn't traditional, those who use the services of temporary placement agencies say they enjoy the work. A survey conducted last year found that nearly 80 percent of temp workers were satisfied with their situation. This number is even more impressive given that 45 percent of respondents said that originally, the economy had "forced" them into temporary work.