Temporary worker employment history — referencing fragmented and short-tenure histories

The employment history challenge in temp recruitment

A permanent candidate's employment history is typically a sequence of roles with identifiable employers who can be contacted for references. A temp worker's employment history may be a series of short-term assignments through multiple agencies, interspersed with gaps, informal work and periods of zero hours activity. Standard reference processes that require two references from the last three years of employment can be genuinely difficult to complete for workers with this kind of history — previous employers may be multiple agencies rather than direct employers, assignments may have been too short to generate meaningful references, and contact details for agencies that handled previous assignments may be difficult to obtain.

How RefAssure handles non-standard employment histories

RefAssure's flexible template system allows agencies to configure reference requests appropriate to the employment context. For workers with primarily agency employment history, the reference request can be directed to the agency that handled the previous assignment rather than the end client. For workers with short-tenure histories, the reference can be configured to acknowledge the short-term nature of the engagement and ask about conduct and reliability within that context. For workers with gaps, the reference process documents the gap and records what reference evidence was obtained despite it.

The key compliance principle for temp agencies dealing with fragmented employment histories is documentation — documented evidence of the reference attempt, documented evidence of what reference information was obtained, and documented evidence of any gaps that could not be referenced. RefAssure generates this documentation automatically for every reference attempted, regardless of outcome. From 99p per reference.