temp agencies struggle to keep up with ‘huge demand’

With this Omicron wave, companies are facing a difficulty: the absence of their employees, due to isolation due to Covid-19 or unvaccinated contact cases. These confined employees must be replaced and many companies are turning to temporary work.

But the replacements are in the same situation as the incumbents, testifies Éric Haddad, the CEO of the interim group Connectt: “With us too, we had a high rate of absences. Today, to give you an order of magnitude, we have between 17% and 20% of temporary workers with us who either have Covid or non-contact cases. -vaccinated, so that means not available.”

This represents approximately 400 of the 2,000 temporary workers registered in the group. Among them, Warenn tested positive at the end of December, just before resuming his mission. “I caught the Covid on December 29 and suddenly I was off for a week, he says. I was drunk but hey, missions, we have plenty of others. “As there are a lot of positive cases, there must be quite a few companies looking for temporary workers so that doesn’t worry me more than that”, says Warren.

And indeed, this beginning of the year is particularly intense, according to the CEO of Connectt. His group is “today faces enormous demand.”

“The month of January, in the interim, in general, it is always a small recovery which rises crescendo as the year progresses. This year, it has been a very, very strong demand.

Éric Haddad, CEO of the Connectt interim group

“This is the first time in 15 years that I have seen such a rapid recovery,” says Vania Pinto, manager of one of Connectt’s Paris agencies, specializing in construction. She realized this with her teams in the field: “Normally, in the construction sector, we resume around the third week of January, or even the first week of February. And there, we are almost on the schedule we had before the Christmas holidays. I never saw that.”

As a result of this intense activity and these isolated temporary workers, not all companies can be satisfied. More and more offers no longer find takers.