Work shy students? It’s a myth

Guest blogger ACR Business Coordinator Claire Latham

It’s holiday time – great news for your staff probably not such good news for you. If your office is anything like ours, despite the best laid plans, we often find ourselves with a spell over schools holidays where we’re more short handed than we’d like to be.

We regularly stop the gaps, as it were, with students.

We get a lot of university students, and post A’ level students, registering with us in the run up to the summer holidays. Most are looking for short term work either to pay off student debts or maybe to fund a summer holiday.

For them, temporary work has many benefits. First and foremost, it pays! Secondly, it’s a great opportunity to get a peek inside a sector they may be interested in working in in the future. Thirdly, it looks good on their CV to have work experience under their belt.

For you, as an employer, taking on temporary staff over the summer spell can pay real dividends.

We have temps on our books able to cover a huge range of disciplines – from simply answering phones and taking messages, to meeting and greeting, to carrying out detailed project work or overseeing a department in the manager’s absence. That means there’s no need for a department to be partially closed, or on a go-slow, over the summer.

Temps can be taken on for as long or short a period as you need. One client found their two receptionists had holidays which overlapped by a day. We were able to provide them with a temp to cover that one shift.

We find students are often given excellent feedback by companies – they’re keen to make a good impression with a view to further work in the future, they’re new to the business so often able to inject something fresh to the mix and, if they’re forward-thinking enough to register with a recruitment agency, it tends to mean they’re not shy of hard work!