(BELGA / BENOIT DOPPAGNE)
The temporary employment sector, essential to fill part of the 180,000 positions mobilized for the Paris Olympic Games, intends to take advantage of the visibility offered by the event to attract and sustainably retain new profiles.
“The needs are massive and over a short period, there is a need to call on everyone, including temporary workers,” observes Isabelle Eynaud-Chevalier, general delegate of Prism’emploi, which brings together temporary work companies.
Temporary employment, which represents around 750,000 full-time equivalents and 2.8 million people according to Prism’emploi, already plays an important role and the various agencies are holding job forums or massive communication in view of the Olympic Games (July 26 – 11 august).
Among them, the temporary employment giant Randstad, partner of Paris 2024 and provider of all the needs of the organizing committee (around 4,000 people recruited, a thousand temporary workers), serves as a standard. Through promotions on social networks or recruitment days in stadiums, Randstad is casting a wide net.
“Sport, in general, interests and attracts but, for the Olympic Games, the attractiveness is even greater,” analyzes Frank Ribuot, president of the Randstad group in France. It claims to have received 16,000 applications for its 3,200 temporary jobs still to be filled.
The hotel, catering, cleaning, transport and security sectors still have many opportunities to offer, most of them temporary.
As a result, “all temporary employment agencies are on deck,” summarizes Ms. Eynaud-Chevalier.
– To play one’s role –
“We do not need to be an official partner to fully play our role,” says Sébastien Collard, director of operations in Île-de-France and Grand Est at Synergie, a specialist in particular in temporary work. Sixteen of their agencies have been specially dedicated to the Olympics.
Most groups must meet needs in professions already under pressure, such as private security or catering.
On Manpower’s side, we do indeed anticipate a “rise in power from April” until the end of summer, but “the impact on traditional activities such as construction” is more difficult to prevent.
The sector is also trying to deal with the probable forced slowdown in construction, another major sector of their activity in the summer. But most construction sites should be slowed down, or even stopped, due to the drastic security measures put in place around the sites, which should automatically reduce needs in the area.
Others, however, imagine last minute requests in all other professions, including after the start of the first tests. “Customers do not yet have precise ideas about the real impact that the Olympics will have on their activity,” explains Synergie.
– To see further –
The challenge is above all “to ensure that the people already recruited and placed on schedules are there”, points out Benoît Derigny, general manager of Manpower France. “We must retain our recruits.”
The fears of +no show+ are very real, particularly in certain sensitive and tense professions: at the London Olympics in 2012, due to the failure of private security, the army had to intervene in disaster at the last moment.
Which does not prevent agencies from looking further, well after the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games on September 8, and from welcoming this new pool of profiles.
“Candidates are coming to us for the first time thanks to the Games,” rejoices Benoît Derigny of Manpower. For him, as for Sébastien Collard at Synergie, the idea is then “to keep, to reassign a part of these candidates to other more traditional missions”.
As for Randstad, “8,000 people among the 16,000 applications received have already given their consent to be contacted again after the Games”. “We also believe in a form of heritage,” says Frank Ribuot.