5 ms·

Contract to perm is the best way by far. In the UK the contract rates are typically significantly higher, so even if the person isn't offered a job at the end

• mjohn 11y ago
  Also if the company ends up being a bad fit, then it looks less bad on the person's CV than if they join as a perm and then leave after a few months.
• organsnyder 11y ago
  Depends on the individual's preferences and life situation. I was offered a contract-to-hire position earlier this year, and turned it down because the contract term happened to coincide with the expected birthdate of our third child. Even though I was confident that I would succeed in the position, I didn't want to deal with any uncertainty around that date. Also, in the United States, health insurance is usually tied with employment; while the ACA (Obamacare) has made it significantly better with the introduction of the exchanges, it's still a hassle to switch insurance providers, especially around a major life event such as the birth of a child. In my particular case, the company I did opt for ended up being a bust, to the point that I resigned without having another offer in place. It ended up working well—I'm in a job now with tons of job security, good pay, a good work environment, and interesting work—but I ended up in the exact situation I was hoping to avoid when I rejected the CtH position.
  • llimllib 11y ago
    Also if I were employed at a good company but was possibly interested in leaving, I would never leave it for a contract-to-perm position.
    • derekp7 11y ago
      I came into my current position as a CtH, but that was only because I was laid off at the time. So with CtH, you either get people who want to stay contractors, or people who are unemployed.
      • organsnyder 11y ago
        That was my situation. After spending a the better part of a decade in other positions, I was trying to get back into a full-time dev position.
    • ctide 11y ago
      Do you doubt your skills? Why are you interviewing if you're employed at a good company? I hear this position often when people talking about contract-to-perm, and I just don't see it. If you're good at what you do, and people enjoy working with you, why wouldn't you take a contract to perm position? The only reasons I can see are that you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit if they hired you) or you end up not liking the team/company as much (same as if they had hired you.) So, why wouldn't you? And I don't buy the 'I have a good job' line, because you wouldn't even be entertaining offers if you weren't interested in leaving your current role.
      • vonmoltke 11y ago
        > you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit if they hired you) Or, you rubbed the wrong, politically-connected person the wrong way. Yes, this is always a danger, but a contract employee is more expendable and easier to get rid of. Or, they weren't really looking for a permanent hire and this was just a means of tricking someone into a contract who wouldn't otherwise take one. Or, the company hits a rough patch and decides to freeze hiring to avoid layoffs. There are a whole host of things that could go wrong in a contract situation that are either tempered or nonexistent when you are permanent.
        • throwaway859876 11y ago
          And ... you don't get stock. And ... when you go perm, your vesting schedule starts after your contract. And ... if you get hurt/sick while you're a contractor, you're fired. And ... you often don't have full facilities access as a contractor. And ... after you go perm, half your co-workers still think you're a contractor, and blow off your email requests.
      • pekk 11y ago
        It isn't a foregone conclusion that if you have good skills, you will be permanently hired out of a contract position. If it were a foregone conclusion, they would just hire perm.
      • llimllib 11y ago
• lhnz 11y ago
  Contract to perm is a good idea, but in the UK at least, the contract rates are significantly higher than permanent salaries so unless you offer them a salary that is way above the market rates for permanent staff and perhaps a role and responsibility level that'd truly stretch them it's quite likely they're going to decline your offer.
  • robmcm 11y ago
    This is the kicker, you need to offer a compensation package that is as good as a contract rate. However you know what you are getting so you could argue it's worth it...
  • noarchy 11y ago
    This has been true for me in Canada. I've declined multiple full-time offers because my contract rate was far more attractive than the benefits that came with the full-time alternative.
• kangman 11y ago
  Isn't it probably also due to the fact that the UK offers unemployment and healthcare benefits that far surpass what is offered here in the States? So that there is a safety if at the end of the contract you are left with no offer.
  • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    not for Single People it doesn't JSA lasts 6 months and you have to jump though a lot of hoops.
  • robmcm 11y ago
    I expect so, but you can also get double your salary with tax breaks when contracting. So it would be easy to cover private health care etc with the additional money.
  • switch007 11y ago
    That view is bit outdated, more applicable to the Labour era of 1997-2010. The UK is not the welfare state that it once was. The NHS is in pieces and you have to beg for scraps of welfare.
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• switch007 11y ago
  How does one transition from perm to those kind of gigs? Are they reserved for top-tier talent only? Is there much outside of the City?
  • robmcm 11y ago
    I can only speak for London, but there are a lot. Normally you need some experience, ideally in a specific skill, but shorter contracts may be available for people with less experience. If you are interested, it's best to find a decent recruiter who knows what they are talking about (easy to tell from a quick phone call).
• edw519 11y ago
  Contract to perm is the best way by far. For whom? It's bad for the worker because you're going to work for a company that is admitting by its behavior that it has little confidence in its abiliity to assess talent. Where else is it weak? (My experience shows that those who can't assess talent usually can't do a whole lot of other important things, too.) It's bad for the company because it limits its pool of candidates. Good luck recruiting desirable high achievers by telling them you can't tell if they're good enough to hire. Assessing talent and determining long term resource requirements is like anything else in I.T.: it's fundamental and must be mastered to become any good. Contract to perm is a red flag that something is wrong.
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    > It's bad for the worker because you're going to work for a company that is admitting by its behavior that it has little confidence in its abiliity to assess talent. Where else is it weak? You seem to think that willingness to admit that assessing fit for a particular job is unreliable without actually experience of the candidate working in the real conditions is correlated with the relative degree to which the company is unable to assess such skills relative other companies (rather than being driven by the degree to which the company is aware of difficulties affecting all companies hiring for similar jobs, or differences in the features of the specific job which make assessment difficult.) There is no justification that I can see for this assumption.
    • edw519 11y ago
      Assessing talent is a predictable scientific process. Good companies know how to do it. Other companies don't, so they use contract to perm to compensate. I have hired hundreds of programmers and have never been disappointed. The recruitment process lasted as long as it had to to know that it was a good fit. Contract to perm was never needed.
      • dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Assessing talent is a predictable scientific process. Good companies know how to do it. Other companies don't, so they use contract to perm to compensate. Alternatively, its a predictable scientific process which is more accurate when actual time in seat is devoted to the assessment, and good companies know this and bad companies just delude themselves into settling with a less reliable process. Or, more accurately, assessing fit for job is a task that varies by the specific job (including, among other things, how much room the role, size, and mission of the organization leaves for customizing the job around the individual) for which suitability is being assessed, and good companies (in this regard, at least are those that understand the mechanisms which are most appropriate for assessing fit for the jobs they actually are hiring for and choose the right methods (which may or may not include contract-to-perm for particular jobs), and bad companies are those that don't (which may include picking contract-to-perm for jobs where its not the best choice -- or not choosing it for jobs where it is.)
• gaius 11y ago
  I struggle to understand the motivations of any of the parties involved here. Why would someone want to do the same job for less money and let's be honest these days, no more job security? Why would someone whose goal is a perm position, setup a company, just to do job searches with?
  • robmcm 11y ago
    You can use one of the many umbrella companies.
    • gaius 11y ago
      No-one whose goal is permanent, would bother to do that, when there are plenty of companies doing normal interviews. No-one who is willing to do it, would want to convert back to permie afterwards. If it doesn't work out, it looks worse on your CV to be a "failed" contractor scurrying back to a permie role, than if you'd been a permie who'd quit after a few months. Maybe some people do go down this route - but a company whose policy is to hire this way, won't be able to scale it.