Advice about interim positions during downturns

By Annie Waite, Global Editor, the Internal Comms Hub, Melcrum

Seize the day! When it comes to downturns, really, what else can you do? Sink into a bubbling dark hole of doom and gloom? Pah! There are still opportunities to be had, I say.

Lynn Hazan, president of Lynn Hazan & Associates, an executive search and consulting firm specializing in marketing and communication placements across the US, agrees. “The profession of communication and marketing is always experiencing up-and-down cycles,” she says in a Hub news article. “There’s definitely still hiring going on and there are always pockets of opportunity.”

So this offers communicators affected by the downturn a beacon of hope for their short-term future. What does Lynn advise these interim candidates to do in order to score that interim employment placement?

1. Be flexible. “If there are no full-time jobs, think about reinventing yourself. Create consortiums with other kinds of talent. For example, if you’re a PR person and know an art director or a web designer, bring your talent pools together to deliver as a unit.”
2. Consider part-time work. Not all corporations currently have full-time positions available. “The more you adapt to changing modalities of employment the more employable you will be. This is better than putting everything on hold and spending 6 months looking for a full-time job that may not exist."
3. Take a pay cut, work hard. “We recommend people be flexible with their salary expectations – and they may have to work a little bit harder or longer.”

And Lynn's advice for communicators and companies looking to hire for interim positions is to ask yourself:

• What are your needs and how should the outside talent help?
• Why do you need an interim – what will they do to advance your mission?
• What do you want to achieve and what results do you hope to obtain?

Check out the Hub next week for more on communication issues surrounding interim placements, but in the meantime, let us know if you think hiring interim employees is a good or bad idea and for what reasons.

I'd say there are clearly benefits (interims bring an impartial point of view to a company, for example), but there could also be downsides (interims could be resented by existing employees who have seen their colleagues laid off, but replaced by "part-timers" - therefore potentially reducing employee morale at this time). 

Comments

[David Ferrabee]

Annie,
I think interim has always been a good option for people. Usually when you are looking for a job, it's not the first one that is good, but the one after. So interim might make that process easier.
Also, I think any internal communications people in management roles should look at this time of uncertainty as a time to fire their people up... not fire them.
There are opportunities for internal communicators in times like these:
- business education
- employee engagement
- focus on sales
- restructurings
When times are tough businesses should be holding their people even closer. And internal communicators are key to that embrace.
/df