Pros
Manpower offers an excellent benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life, 401(k), stock options, and much more. They offer free ongoing career training through the length of your employment, including business skills, desktop (PC) skills, and IT certification preparation; they also offer preparatory courses for various professional certifications including HR. They offer fair compensation with competitive salary and incentives/bonuses and they not only offer but stress advancement within the company, often promoting from within. Working as a staffing specialist can also be personally rewarding, particularly in these dire economic times with soaring unemployment rates. This is a job and a company where you can make a difference in the lives of those around you.
Cons
It can be a difficult job to manage temporary associates; the ideal person must have a personality that can handle management responsibilities. Almost all positions require a sales aspect as well, so you must have an excellent balance between customer service, management, and sales, which often are conflicting skills. A typical day can consist of checking your voicemail to find out 15 people have called out sick, 6 of which are constant repeat offenders which must be counselled or disciplined. An hour later, you have your sales 'hat' on and are out making cold calls at local companies, constantly battling to speak with the hiring manager, trying to promote your company to bring in more jobs for your employees and candidates. Later in the day, you are conducting interviews, skills assessments, and reference checks to match the perfect candidates to their perfect job, handling job offer negotiations between clients and candidates. Also in this tight schedule, you have to accept 100 phone calls of employees calling in available for work, potential candidates calling for general information, clients calling to request employees, and clients calling to end assignments. You juggle candidates walking in to fill out applications with skills that you can use, many without those skills. And on top of everything else, after those ending assignment calls, you have the task of contacting employees either to notify them that their job is ending, with or without another assignment ready to start, and sometimes having to terminate employees for infractions. You must be able to multi-task, prioritize, and fulfill several roles at once in order to handle a position with this level of responsibility.