Who will be the country's largest private employer in the next two to three years? If your guess is one of the bellwether IT companies such as Infosys, HCL or Wipro, think again. It could well be a human resource firm. Temporary staffing, hitherto the exclusive preserve of the unorganised players, is fast gaining ground with corporates, as more and more organised temporary staffing players are entering the fray. Right from a college student to a 50-year-old professional can find a temp job in the corporate world. Temping opportunities exist across all industries and almost all job functions. Sectors such as manufacturing, retail, logistics, IT/ITES, FMCG, telecom, and financial services are appointing temps in large numbers.

Although temp staffing has always existed, it operated in a local, almost informal fashion. Temping was usually routed through small agencies, chartered accountancy firms and locals who were into small-time placements for corporates. While a permanent, full-time job may still be the norm, labour markets worldwide are changing. The 'job-for-life' is being replaced with life-long learning, multi-skilling and a working life with multiple careers and flexible hours. Temp jobs help you network and don a variety of hats. They can be enticing enough to even draw people with permanent jobs.

Temping has many advantages: it helps you develop new skills, gives you broader experience and provides you the opportunity to work with various levels of management. Sensing the huge opportunity, multinational staffing companies like Manpower, Ma Foi, Kelly Services and Adecco SA have already set up bases in India and are growing rapidly. Advocates of the temp recruitment model say it helps companies to remain agile, enabling them to expand and contract their workforce and their expenses with the ebb and flow of the market. Because companies can select people with the exact skills they are seeking for a specific amount of time, temps are often an ideal, if temporary, solution. More and more companies are beginning to understand what benefits these short-term assignments can bring to an organisation.

This is despite the fact that temping in India is still mostly confined to low-end jobs like billing and so on, unlike in the West where temps are usually hired to fix a critical problem or facilitate a major transition. But Indian staffing companies believe that these are early days yet and the trend will catch up fast in India, too.

Staffing companies also say that temporary staffing helps workers to get jobs and companies to expand their headcount even when market conditions are uncertain. Data from several countries clearly brings out this trend. If companies were forced to employ only full-time workers on a permanent basis, they would have to either forgo the opportunity to expand production to meet the rise in demand, or incur excess costs for surplus staff during lean periods.

Temp salaries are decent enough. While the remuneration depends on experience, qualification, the job function, sector and the city where the opening is, an HR executive can get a starting salary of Rs 7,000. While the average salary in the lower management rung is around Rs 7,500 per month, for middle levels, it is Rs 35,000 and at senior levels, it can go up to Rs 4.5 lakh per month. Though temp jobs are not yet giving permanent jobs a run for their money, at times, temps can earn more than permanent employees. Industry experts believe that the gap between the pay packages of leased and permanent employees could be as wide as 40 per cent.