The First Rule of Temping is No One Talks About Temping

It used to be that when you moved to a new city and didn’t know anyone, or just graduated from school with not a lot of job experience, you could always temp. Maybe you’d get lucky and you find a job somewhat to your liking and get hired on permanently after a few months. Nowadays, like everything else in the job market, temping is not what it used to be. A rise in temp workers used to mean an improving economy. However, according to economists, while temp workers are still being hired, and demand has even risen, they are not often hired on permanently. The benefit to companies is that they don’t have to pay benefits and they don’t have to fire people they can’t afford to keep. In my experience, it is a rare temp agency that offers benefits that equals more than some help in opening a medical emergency savings account or some crumpled coupons to Lenscrafters.

Often when I have found myself between jobs or in need of some extra cash, I have been known to temp. The last time I looked for temp work (last fall), I was met with packed waiting rooms filled with people that had worked in the mortgage industry. While my secretarial skills aren’t A+ (they’re a solid B) I have always gotten gigs doing something, even if it’s just filing. This time I signed up with four agencies and I got not one job in a month. Everyone basically told me that they had a lot more people than they did jobs. The other oddity I noticed is that most agencies had a sign in the lobby essentially saying, if you don’t have any college experience, don’t bother us. That did not used to be true.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I briefly temped for one of the big movie studios. I was supposed to answer a phone for an executive, but she liked to answer her own phone. So, I only had to answer it while she was at lunch and it never rang then. Every day around 4pm, she would bring me a one page document to fax. I think she felt bad for me. I was probably sending crossword puzzles to her mom’s house or something. My day consisted of trying to hide in my itchy polyester clothes so no one would notice that I didn’t do anything. It was oddly stressful. I would rather have been working. I sat in an almost empty cubicle. It had an electric typewriter and not much else. It did not have a computer, so no minesweeper, no solitaire, no email no nothing. I read the complete works of Dorothy Parker in a week.

These days jobs like that have probably dried up. I have a suspicion that if you happen to be lucky enough to land one of these now golden temp jobs, you’d have to actually work all day.

I’m curious as to what your recent job experiences have been. If you are looking for work, have you temped? Do you have any thoughts about how to survive in a shrinking job market?

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