Start A Recruitment Agency

Manage OHS Risks

For recruitment agencies providing Temporary/Contract/On-Hired Staff to their clients there are inherent Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) risks in doing so and it makes sense to build your business around ways to reduce these risks.

Noting that there are differing OH&S rules and regulations in different parts of the world – the following are suggestions on the sort of things that you can do to protect your Temps, your Clients and your Business.

Get OH&S information from your clients

The starting point is generally with your clients and getting information around the staff that they will need. You are no doubt adept in discovering what skills and experience are required by a client for a particular Temp job but it is also essential to get information about the work site, risks & hazards, licences required, induction processes undertaken, etc.

Your business should have processes in place to capture this information and store it in a way that it can be used in both finding staff and communicating the information to staff placed at a client.

Get OH&S information from your candidates

Much like the process around gathering information from your clients, you will want to do a similar thing for candidates. The sort of things that you may want to have;

• Copies of licences & Certificates (plus processes to manage their expiry)
• Health questionnaire

Give OH&S information to your candidates

Getting all of this information is important but not as important as having a process to inform your Temps about the things that they need to know when working at your client’s site. These include;

• Tasks and responsibilities of the role
• Licences/Certificates needed (eg they need to take them with them when they start)
• What to expect on the first day (eg who to report to, how will they be inducted, who to speak to if they have any questions, etc)
• What to do if they are injured

Monitor & Respond

You are likely to regularly be in contact with your client and it is also important that there are processes to regularly be in contact with your temps. This could be via onsite “toolbox” type meetings, phone calls, emails etc but it is also worth making sure that both your clients and temps have an understanding on what to do in cases of an emergency and how to report any OH&S incidents to you.