Nervous

I’m glad!!
It’s all about work life balance. If you find things falling out of balance then you start making adjustments.

I’ve done temp work for most of my life. My shortest assignment was a few hours. My longest was 4.5yrs (temp the whole time!). I’ve never walked off a job but there have bern a few times I refused a contact extension.

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Temp work was great with my ability to rapidly gain new skills. My first agency routinely sent me on jobs for which I wasn’t really qualified cause they knew I’d pick stuff up immediately. It allowed me to increase my pay with each new skill and job!

My dad was a lifetime-1job person and didn’t like me job hopping but I realized, very early on, that only working at a company for a few years would become the norm one day, so I was better adapted for the future. My longest stint at a company was 8.5yrs, a combo of temp, perm, and the company being bought out several times so my job kept changing. I like to keep things to a year, 2 max, to stay out of office politics.

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I said the same to men when I hot thin… “you didn’t want me then; you can’t have me now!”

Sorry about your agency experiences. There are a LOT of bad ones out there! The good ones look at your skills, not whether or not they can contact a supervisor (esp since most companies require employees to give only positive reviews or none at all, to avoid lawsuits). I know my 3yrs of unemployment, plus all supervisors being long gone from those firms, hurts me.

I thought of you a couple min ago when it took all my strength not to provide HerbaLife with cover letter that simply said, “your application website is a f*ing DISASTER!”

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Yeah… bad agencies.i started by taking typing and Excel tests. I know good agencies still work that way… but they’re few and far between.

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Yep. NEVER respond to Indian accents.
Apple One and Kelly used to be good starter agencies but I can’t vouch for them now.

Apple One was esp good because you could transition to Apple Professionals, which basically doubled your pay (then you’re “contact” instead of “temp”… exact same thing but diff pay scales).

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Yes, in CA you get benefits as a temp. Most “starter” work is short term… filling in for employees on leave, or sick, or help to cover a special project. Nowadays, temp-to-perm isn’t very common. Well, not at my level… I’m not sure about entry level work. But either way, the agreements are two way… you don’t have to accept extensions, and the employer doesn’t have to keep you for the full length of the contract. If they decide they want to hire you, they pay a sort of “finders fee” to the agency… usually 3 months of whatever the agency’s profit from you would have been (the old formula used to be that you made 3/5ths of what the agency charged the client… client pays $25/hr for you to make $15… but I’m sure that’s changed as benefits increased). Soo… a lot of times you work temp for 3mos before getting an offer because then there’s no add’l agency fee.

There is also “1099” work… independent contractor with no benefits… but it’s rare now. It sounds bad but the pay is usually high enough to cover your own insurance, esp after allowable tax deductions. For me, the sole problem with 1099 work is that you’re not paying into unemployment and disability programs so you also can’t collect from them later.

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