Your finance manager is drowning. Invoices are piling up, month-end is chaos, and they've asked for help three times in the past two months.
So you hire someone. Write a job ad, find a finance assistant, add £28,000 to the payroll. Problem solved.
Except six months later, the project that caused the spike is finished, and you've got someone permanent doing work that doesn't really exist anymore. Or the role you hired for wasn't quite right, and now you're managing someone who's visibly underutilised.
Permanent hires feel like the proper solution, but sometimes the problem isn't that you need more people - it's that you need different people, or the same people working differently, or just someone for three months while you figure out what you actually need.
Before you write that job ad and commit to permanent headcount, it's worth checking whether you're in one of these situations.
The workload might not be permanent
A big project comes in and suddenly you need extra hands. But hiring someone permanent means you're committing to years of salary to solve a problem that might only last six months.
This happens all the time with seasonal work, one-off projects, or covering someone's maternity leave. The work is real and urgent, but it has an end date. Hiring permanently anyway because it feels safer just creates a different problem later when you're paying someone to do work that's disappeared.
Temps exist for this exact reason. Don’t think that you’re cutting corners - you're matching the hire to the actual length of work which is much more efficient.
You might be covering a gap, not filling a role
Someone's on long-term sick leave, or they've handed in notice and you've got three months to cover. The instinct is to hire their replacement now, but then what happens when they come back? Or when the role changes while they're gone and the replacement doesn't quite fit anymore?
Temporary cover keeps things moving without creating overlap, redundancy conversations, or the awkward situation where you've hired someone permanent for a role that no longer exists in the shape you thought it did.
The role might not be ready yet
You think you need a marketing person or "someone technical." But when you actually sit down to write the job description, it’s a little bit too vague. A bit of social media, some content writing, maybe events, possibly some design work if they can do it.
If that’s the case avoid hiring someone permanent if you don’t feel they’re going to be busy year round.
Why not test the role first by bringing in a temp or contractor to see what actually needs doing? This lets you figure out the job before you commit to paying someone for the next three years to do it.
What hiring differently means to us
Temporary staff aren't just to be used for holiday cover, they're for testing roles, handling project work, covering peaks, and buying yourself time to figure out what you need. A three-month temp who helps you understand the role properly is cheaper than a permanent hire.
Contractors work for specialist stuff you need done well but infrequently. Bookkeeping, HR advice, technical projects. Paying someone to do it properly twice a year beats hiring someone permanent.
You might find the answer isn't hiring at all, but instead moving work around differently. Could your finance manager drop the low-value admin and focus on the work that needs their expertise? Could you centralise tasks that are currently scattered across three people who all do them slightly differently?
Temp-to-perm is useful when you're genuinely not sure. Bring someone in temporarily, see if the role works, convert them if it does. If it doesn't, you've tested it without locking yourself into three years of salary.
When permanent hiring is right
Permanent hires are right when the work is ongoing, the role is clearly defined, and you've got the capacity to onboard someone properly. If those things are genuinely true, hire permanently.
We can help you work this out
We won't push you toward permanent if temporary makes more sense for your situation. We’ll help you figure out what actually solves the problem rather than what just feels like the proper thing to do.
Our temp-to-perm option exists specifically for situations where you're not sure yet. And because our average time to hire is 10 days, you're not stuck waiting months while work piles up and the problem gets worse.
Get in touch or call 0161 474 7888 and we'll talk through what makes sense for your specific situation.
