the Cost of Temporary Retail Employees

I hired a temporary employee through a placement agency to help me with my inventory. The employee worked 8 hours a day for 5 consecutive days. I paid the placement agency $500.

My company needed to do an 'end of year' inventory last February. We kept intending to it but just did not have the manpower. Finally in February we decided to hire a temporary employee to help out. The employee we got had previous inventory experience. The experience they had was very different though. They'd had inventory guns to use where we were doing ours by hand count. The person we had was a hard worker but didn't catch on very quickly. In their defense, our business is not something most people are familiar with and it was difficult to explain the differences between products and how some should be counted together and some products as separate products. They weren't quite done by the time the week was up so I ended up having to pull an employee off the floor to finish up.

If we had it to do again I'd take an employee with less experience but a little bit of a quicker learner than someone with experience. Especially because general inventory experience wasn't applicable to the type of inventory we were doing.