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Full time employees

These are employees that work for you and your business permanently, whether they’re full or part time. It’s good to have permanent employees for reliabitly and the fact that they know your business, often as well as you do; and there is nothing like having employees you can rely on. However, this does come at some cost and there are certain obligations you are required to fulfil as an employer. These things extend to holiday pay, training, insurance etc, etc; the list goes on.

Fixed term contract

This is particularly useful if you need someone for a specific length of time, perhaps during an expansion or in an advisory capacity. Fixed term contracts allow you to renew or update the contract at the end in the event that you may want to keep on that particular employee; however you need to be aware that your employee may well have other contracts to go to when yours is through. It’s always worth considering hiring someone full or part time.

Freelancers and consultants

It may be necessary sometimes to hire a freelancer to do some work for you. This is a good way of getting short bursts of heavy workload out of the way when you can’t afford, or don’t have the time to take on another permanent or fixed term contract. However, freelancers, no matter what job they specialise in, can sometimes be unreliable and since there is no contract in place to ensure the work is carried out and to a specific standard you are basically taking your chances. Having said that, there are some excellent freelancers out there that honour their obligations on time every time and cause no problem at all; the only problem is that there are often so many of them around that you can spend months trying to find a good one among the bad.

On call, or bank workers

These are workers that you can call on in much the same way as a freelancer. On call workers are often called in an emergency and they are often registered with an agency. You need to be aware of any contracts that may come with your on call staff in case you are obligated to them in any way, but this isn’t usually the case; you will normally just be required to pay them, or the agency for the hours they have worked. On call, or bank agencies are very useful at finding you an employee at the last minute if you have someone cancel their shift or fall ill, however, they don’t guarantee the quality of the employee you get; this is something they simply can’t tell because they don’t monitor them.