How to hire interns and temp workers properly
Posted on May 7th, 2014 Read time: 2 minutes
Hiring interns can be tricky, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. The newspaper reported unpaid interns have been in the press lately as sources for liabilities, as they may be required to do only a maximum number of hours and a certain amount of work before they are technically paid labor, and must be compensated as employees. This has cost many companies a lot of money. One solution is to hire through an employer of record, which will take care of much of the work having to do with keeping temporary workers, writing up the relevant ACA papers and holding much of a worker's liability in its own hands.
The top three rules for keeping an intern and ensuring no risk of getting sued for having the intern do too much work, according to the source, are:
- The internship must resemble training and be done in an educational environment.
- The internship work benefits the intern through the long term.
- There is an understanding from the beginning the intern will not make wages during the internship.
Another risk that comes from trying to cut corners in a hiring environment is to hire "perma-temps" through unscrupulous and immoral temporary services companies. This can also put an employer into risk for being sued. There is a fight in California about this very topic, according the Los Angeles Times, which writes many workers are fighting back against the loop-holes letting companies get away with this.
The best way for a company to protect itself from accusations it is mistreating its interns or its temp workers is always to do things above the board and with agencies that can be trusted. There are recruiting agencies that hire out temp workers without ever stooping to using "perma-temps," and such an agency would be the first to tell a company if it were beginning to cross that line. An additional solution is through hiring an HR back office, which would be contracting a company to do HR. This is different from hiring temps because the employees doing the job are full-time workers who simply work through the HR work of other companies for a living.
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Posted on May 7th, 2014 Read time: 2 minutes
Hiring interns can be tricky, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. The newspaper reported unpaid interns have been in the press lately as sources for liabilities, as they may be required to do only a maximum number of hours and a certain amount of work before they are technically paid labor, and must be compensated as employees. This has cost many companies a lot of money. One solution is to hire through an employer of record, which will take care of much of the work having to do with keeping temporary workers, writing up the relevant ACA papers and holding much of a worker's liability in its own hands.
The top three rules for keeping an intern and ensuring no risk of getting sued for having the intern do too much work, according to the source, are:
- The internship must resemble training and be done in an educational environment.
- The internship work benefits the intern through the long term.
- There is an understanding from the beginning the intern will not make wages during the internship.
Another risk that comes from trying to cut corners in a hiring environment is to hire "perma-temps" through unscrupulous and immoral temporary services companies. This can also put an employer into risk for being sued. There is a fight in California about this very topic, according the Los Angeles Times, which writes many workers are fighting back against the loop-holes letting companies get away with this.
The best way for a company to protect itself from accusations it is mistreating its interns or its temp workers is always to do things above the board and with agencies that can be trusted. There are recruiting agencies that hire out temp workers without ever stooping to using "perma-temps," and such an agency would be the first to tell a company if it were beginning to cross that line. An additional solution is through hiring an HR back office, which would be contracting a company to do HR. This is different from hiring temps because the employees doing the job are full-time workers who simply work through the HR work of other companies for a living.
