It’s Wednesday afternoon and someone on your team has just handed in their notice.
Or maybe nobody’s left at all – workload has simply crept up over the last six weeks and everyone’s stretched thinner than they should be.
Either way, you’re now staring at the same question: do I hire someone permanently or do I just get temporary cover in?
Sometimes this feels like a small decision in the moment. But get it wrong in one direction and you’ve made a permanent commitment to a need that was only ever temporary. Get it wrong in the other and you’ve got someone “covering” a role that’s quietly become a fixture of the business without the stability, investment, or commitment that role actually deserves.
The good news is that this decision is more straightforward than it feels under pressure, once you ask yourself the right questions.
Don’t rush it
Under pressure, most businesses default to whichever option feels fastest. Temporary feels quick and low commitment. Permanent feels like the “proper” answer, the one that makes the problem go away for good.
The question that actually matters is: what is the shape of this need?
Is the extra workload temporary in nature – tied to a season, a project, a leave period, a spike that will pass? Or is it a sustained shift – a new permanent level of demand that isn’t going anywhere? Those are two completely different problems and they call for two different solutions.
Get this distinction right and the rest of the decision tends to follow naturally. Get it wrong, and you end up either overcommitting to short-term demand or underinvesting in a role that’s become permanent.
When temporary is the right call
Temporary recruitment has an undeserved reputation as the fallback option; the thing you do when you can’t get a permanent hire sorted in time. That reputation does it a disservice. Used well, temporary recruitment is a deliberate, commercially sound choice, not a compromise.
Seasonal peaks and known demand spikes
If your business has a predictable busy period (retail in the run-up to Christmas, manufacturing ahead of a known order cycle, distribution during seasonal volume) temporary workforce is the right tool. You don’t want permanent headcount sized for your busiest six weeks of the year.
Sickness, holiday and leave cover
Cover for a known, time-bound absence is exactly what temporary recruitment exists for. The need has a clear start and end point, and a permanent hire doesn’t make commercial sense for a gap that will close itself.
Short-term projects
A defined piece of work with a beginning and an end (a system implementation, a particular contract, a transformation project) is well suited to temporary or contract resourcing. The skills are needed now and the business doesn’t need to carry that capability once the project closes.
Sudden, unplanned volume increases
Sometimes the need simply isn’t predictable in advance: a new contract lands, demand spikes unexpectedly, a competitor’s failure sends business your way. Temporary workforce gives you the ability to respond immediately without locking in a long-term cost base before you know whether the increase will hold.
When you don’t know yet whether the role needs to exist permanently
This is the case most businesses overlook. If you’re not sure whether a function justifies permanent headcount, temporary recruitment is a legitimate way to find out. Bring someone in, see how the workload behaves over a few months, and make the permanent decision once you have real evidence rather than a guess. A strong temporary worker can convert to a permanent hire later if the role proves itself.
When permanent is the right call
Permanent hiring is where a business invests in capability that compounds over time. That’s the trade worth understanding clearly: a higher level of commitment, in exchange for stability, continuity, and the kind of institutional knowledge that a rotating temporary workforce structurally can’t build.
Sustained increases in workload
If demand has gone up and shows no sign of coming back down, that’s a permanent need. Continuing to resource it with temporary cover, indefinitely, usually ends up costing more than it saves in both money and stability.
Roles that require deep institutional or client knowledge
Some positions take time to become effective in understanding the systems, the relationships, the unwritten rules of how the business actually operates. That investment only pays off if the person sticks around. Rotating temporary workers through a role like this means you’re permanently re-paying the onboarding cost and never banking the experience.
Leadership and specialist positions
Roles where the person needs to build long-term relationships, develop a deep understanding of strategy, or be trusted to make decisions on the business’s behalf are rarely suited to temporary arrangements. These are roles where continuity itself is part of the value.
When retention and team stability matter more than flexibility
If a function is core to how the business operates day to day and the cost of disruption or turnover would be high, permanent hiring protects against that risk in a way temporary resourcing can’t.
Permanent hiring is a bigger commitment and getting it wrong costs more than a temporary placement that doesn’t work out.
Where interim and onsite solutions fit
It’s worth knowing that temporary and permanent aren’t the only two options on the table.
If you need experienced leadership or specialist capability quickly (someone who can step into a senior role and deliver immediate impact, often for a defined period during a transition, crisis, or change programme) interim recruitment sits in its own category – built for situations where speed and seniority both matter.
And if you’re managing a large or complex temporary workforce (multiple shifts, high volume, ongoing coordination) an embedded onsite solution can remove the administrative burden of running that workforce yourself.
The honest answer to “temporary or permanent?” is that it depends on the shape of the demand, how confident you are that it will hold, how much continuity the role genuinely requires, and how much risk you’re comfortable carrying either way. No generic framework can account for all of that with certainty, because the right answer is specific to your business, your workload, and what’s happening right now.
That’s precisely the kind of conversation worth having with a recruitment partner before any CVs are involved.
Getting this decision right at the start saves the cost of getting it wrong later, in either direction.
At Impact Recruitment, we work across permanent, temporary, interim and onsite solutions which means the advice we give isn’t shaped by which service we’d rather sell you. If you’re weighing this up right now, we’re happy to talk it through honestly.
