The 5 Risk Levels to Monitor with Temporary Staffing Agencies

Why evaluate temp agencies and temporary workers?

Temporary staffing agencies play a key role in your value chain: they provide personnel who are directly involved in your processes—sometimes in sensitive or regulated tasks. By fully integrating them into your TPRM/TPGRC framework, you strengthen operational reliability and reduce long-term risks associated with external collaborators.

Temp agencies are suppliers like any other—exposed to various risks and potential weaknesses that organizations must anticipate and measure. This includes both the agencies themselves and the temporary workers they provide.

Certification & Compliance: Securing Your Legal Obligations

You rely on temp agencies to supply profiles often subject to strict regulatory requirements: certifications, professional licenses, workplace safety, mandatory training…

By evaluating your agencies and their temps:

• You ensure every assignment is backed by certified, up-to-date skills.
• You avoid non-compliance risks (undeclared work, social obligations).
• You standardize practices across sites and partner agencies.
• You secure both internal and external audits.

This builds confidence in the quality of outsourced profiles and the strength of your legal compliance framework.

Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Systems from External Access

Temporary workers often have short-term access to your tools, data, and environments. This makes them a risk population that’s too often underestimated.

By integrating a cybersecurity component into agency and worker evaluations:

• You ensure that sensitive profiles are trained in best practices (phishing, passwords, confidentiality).
• You verify that agencies themselves apply at least minimal cybersecurity standards.
• You reduce the risk of incidents due to lack of awareness or non-compliant tool usage.

You turn your temporary workers into security allies instead of potential vulnerabilities.

Ethics & Compliance: Protecting Your Brand and Commitments

Temps represent your company in front of clients, colleagues, and partners. By evaluating ethical standards:

• You ensure temp agencies comply with anti-corruption rules, human rights, diversity, and non-discrimination.
• You verify that temporary workers understand your ethical standards and internal policies.
• You align external behaviors with your values and CSR commitments.

This creates ethical continuity between internal and external teams.

Environment & CSR: Engaging External Resources Too

While temporary workers may not lead your environmental strategy, their behaviors and daily practices contribute to it.

An environmental assessment allows you to:

• Integrate temp agencies into your CSR goals (responsible partner selection).
• Encourage temps to adopt sustainable, responsible daily practices.
• Better document your Scope 3 under “intellectual services and outsourced labor.”

This strengthens the coherence of your decarbonization efforts.

Skills Verification: Ensuring Operational Reliability

Mastery of skills by temporary workers is a crucial link in your operational performance. Temp agencies provide varied profiles, sometimes assigned to technical, sensitive, or regulated tasks. Including a structured skill verification step in your process allows you to:

• Validate that each temp has the skills required to carry out their mission independently and in line with your internal standards.
• Ensure the relevance and freshness of skills, especially in roles requiring licenses, certifications, or mandatory training.
• Guarantee consistent quality between internal and external teams, with uniform expectations across all sites.
• Reduce the risk of human error, accidents, or failure to follow operational procedures.
• Improve continuous upskilling, through documented feedback to agencies to refine future profiles.

By placing skills verification at the heart of your evaluation through TPRM solutions, you enhance operational reliability, secure your work environments, and improve the overall performance of your relationship with temporary staffing agencies.