The Benefits of Hiring Per Diem Pharmacy Staff

Taking on full-time employees is not inexpensive. If your pharmacy is busy for several weeks and you hire another pharmacist or pharm tech, what do you do with the person(s) when the work load no longer warrants it? Laying off is expensive – you need to pay unemployment insurance. And then you’ll have to go through the costly and time-consuming hiring process all over again when the work load again increases.

But if you see an uptick in work load and you decide to bring on temporary or per diem pharmacy staff, you don’t have to worry about laying them off or finding enough work for them to do to justify their salaries: you can let the pharmacy professionals go when the work load decreases and bring on more staff as – and only when – warranted.

This is only one benefit of hiring per diem pharmacy staff. Read below for some more:

• Hire individuals for per diem assignments as a sort of try out for more permanent work. Hiring someone by just interviews and reference checks doesn’t give you a real sense of his or her competence and work ethic. But if you bring per diem staff on when patient work load increases, take some good notes about the people who work for you: you could end up hiring them later!
• Using a pharmacy staff service, such as Rx relief®, means you don’t have to worry about workman’s compensation costs, health benefits, etc, as these are covered by the staffing service.
• You’ll save considerably on payroll taxes, since the per diem workers aren’t your employees; they’re employed by the staffing firm.
• You’ve no need to screen or interview short-term pharmacy professionals (unless you want to); the staffing firm recruits workers, reviews resumes, interviews potential workers, and checks backgrounds, licenses and references.

In a nutshell, hiring on a per diem basis gives you great flexibility when it comes to the management of your human resources. You can “try before you buy.” You also can ramp up the number of personnel working for you only when you need to (and decrease those numbers easily and cost-effectively when the need dissipates). 

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of hiring per diem pharmacy staff, we’d love to talk to you. Contact us today.