Sales and Marketing
Both inside and outside sales positions may be filled by temps. Many marketing and research companies use temps for training, recruitment, personnel, human resources, and computer applications positions. Some companies will pay a fee to a staffing service to find qualified sales or marketing people. Make sure if you want to work as a professional temp in sales that you do your research and find a staffing service that is qualified to place you in a sales position. In other words, ask the staffing service for stories of success where the staffing service has found jobs for those in sales so that you will not waste your time working with a staffing service that cannot or will not ever be able to place you in a sales job.
Government and Politics
Lobbying groups and political organizations hire temps. Many of these jobs are project work or support jobs. Temps may do survey work or help organize campaigns. Many political organizations turn to staffing services to fill their accounting positions because they have a hard time finding people with specific skills like accounting who want to work in politics.
Even government uses temps. Many government agencies are under what is called a hiring freeze and are not able to hire additional staff. Government gets around such hiring freezes by using temps and not adding them to their permanent head count.
Public Relations
There are not very many public relations firms that use staffing services to find people to work for them, because PR firms are usually flooded with resumes of people looking for jobs. They rarely turn to staffing services to help them fill full-time jobs. They will call staffing services for temps to meet unexpected needs such as the need for a skilled computer person or an accountant to work on a special project. If you really want to work in a business like this, you may be able to use staffing services to get your foot in the door.
Entertainment
The entertainment industry is a lot like PR firms. Firms that are in the film, recording, music, and publishing businesses are also flooded with resumes. However, they call staffing services for support positions. These support positions are critical to the entertainment industry, and staffing services only send very qualified temps.
In my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, it has been my experience that you could starve while you wait for a temp job in the entertainment industry. My advice is to make your preference known to the staffing services with whom you work. Tell them that you want to work in the entertainment industry if that is what you really want to do. In Nashville, the music industry will call a staffing service for a specific job to be done, and specialists in the area of information technology are sometimes sought. The music business in Nashville does not want a staffing service to send in a temp who wants to be an entertainer. If that happens, the staffing service will not be called again. There are stories of country music stars such as Wynonna Judd and Tracy Lawrence (and Garth Brooks's wife) who worked as temps while they were trying to make it in the country music business, but these stories are few and far between.
There are many professionals who run the business of entertainment, from information technology specialists to accountants to lawyers. If you have any of these skills and are good with people, call the particular entertainment business where you want to work, and ask to be referred to a staffing service they use. Sign up with that staffing service and ask to be placed at the entertainment business. In the meantime, be flexible and take other temp jobs to make ends meet.
If a company moves to your city and you want to work for that company, find out what staffing service they are using and apply with that staffing service. Then ask the staffing service to send you to that company.
The Difference between Independent Contractors and Professional Technical Temps
Do you want to be in business for yourself? Be responsible for funding your own health and life insurance? Be responsible for withholding your own taxes, making sure you are allocating from each paycheck what needs to go to Uncle Sam? Do you want to have the sole responsibility for planning and funding your own retirement plan? Do you want to seek out those who need your services and constantly sell yourself? If so, you may want to be an independent contractor. There is a big difference between the professional technical temp and the independent contractor. The independent contractor wants to do all of the aforementioned chores and enjoys all the headaches associated with them. The professional technical temp would rather use his or her technical skills and let someone else a staffing service deal with finding the jobs and all the details with the government and retirement planning that go along with these jobs.
