High-cost Employment Push Companies To Hire Temp Staff

In 2015, as the cost of hiring and employing raised, more private companies preferred to use temporary staffing rather than direct staffing, this has become a new option for cost-conscious Chinese employers.

The practice is gaining currency as recruitment agencies are offering related solutions like apps to clients who are desperate to prune their cost of operations, especially that of labor.

As the result showed, 1,200 Chinese mainland employers in January 2015, and found that 60 percent of them adopted flexible staffing in 2014, and 19 percent of them plan to increase their use of temporary staff this year.

Increased business activity, quick expansion and soaring labor cost in China are prompting Chinese employers to embrace flexible staffing. Instead of three- or five-year tenures, employers are offering contracts for just three months and, sometimes, even a few hours, as per the time needed to finish the job.

Typically, flexible staffing is said to help employers cut costs by up to 40 percent. In China, the practice is still nascent, with temp jobs limited to administration department of organizations.

As a mainstream employment practice, flexible staffing originated in western Europe in 1960, and was widely adopted in the rest of Europe a decade later. Globally, at least 500,000 people work on temporary basis every day. More than 130,000 recruitment firms provide flexible staffing services.