Most employers who call us for the first time are clear on what they need and unclear on how the arrangement works — who employs the person, who carries the coverage, what the markup is buying, and what they are on the hook for. Here is the whole mechanism, without the sales layer.
Temporary staffing has a reputation problem, and a lot of it is earned. The industry has a long tail of operators who send whoever answers the phone, bill for hours nobody verified, and disappear when a placement goes wrong. That is worth naming up front, because the way you avoid it is by understanding the mechanism well enough to ask the right three questions.
So this is not a pitch. It is the plumbing: the employment relationship, the money, the process, and the five failure modes we see most often.
A temporary staffing placement is a tripartite relationship. There are three parties and only two contracts.
The agency and the worker have an employment contract. The agency hires the worker, pays them, remits their source deductions, accrues their vacation and holiday pay, and carries their workers' compensation coverage. The agency and you have a commercial service agreement. You and the worker have no contract at all — but you direct their work, you control the site they stand on, and you are responsible for the conditions they work in.
That split is the single most useful thing to understand, because almost every question employers ask reduces to it. Who issues the T4? The agency. Who decides which line the person works on today? You. Who is responsible for making sure they were shown the emergency exits and the lockout procedure? You — and no service agreement can move that.
First, personnel placement agencies operating in Québec must hold a licence issued by the CNESST, and client businesses are prohibited from retaining the services of an unlicensed agency. This is not a formality — the obligation sits on you as well as on the agency. Ask for the licence number before you sign anything, and verify it.
Second, under the Act respecting labour standards, a client business can be held solidarily liable with the agency for pecuniary obligations owed to the worker. In plain terms: if an unlicensed or insolvent agency fails to pay the people it sent you, that exposure can land on your desk. Licensing is the protection.
In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the licensing regime differs, but the practical test is the same: ask to see the agency's workers' compensation clearance certificate and its liability insurance, and confirm both are current. A legitimate agency will send them in an hour. An operator who stalls has told you something.
Agencies quote either a bill rate (one hourly number that includes everything) or a pay rate plus a markup percentage. Both describe the same thing. What surprises people is how little of it is margin.
Roughly, on a general labour placement, the markup covers five things, in descending order of size:
The practical consequence: a very low markup is a warning, not a bargain. The statutory portion is fixed by law. If an agency's number is dramatically below the market, the money is coming out of screening, out of coverage, or out of the worker — and all three eventually cost you more than you saved. Which is the arithmetic we work through in the cost of a bad hire vs. an agency fee.
"Temp" covers four quite different arrangements, and choosing the wrong one is a common and avoidable mistake.
| Arrangement | Typical use | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Day / call-out labour A shift at a time | Truck arrived, order surge, someone called in sick, inventory count | No continuity. Don't use it for anything with a learning curve — you pay the ramp-up cost every single day |
| Ongoing temporary Open-ended, weekly hours | Sustained volume you're not ready to commit to permanently; second shift you're still proving out | Drift. If someone has been "temporary" for eight months, you have a permanent role and are avoiding a decision |
| Fixed-term contract Defined start and end | Maternity or medical leave cover, seasonal peak, a specific project, a plant shutdown | Set the end date honestly. "Probably until spring" reads as a rolling job to the worker and produces a quit in March |
| Temp-to-hire Trial, then convert | You want the role permanently but want to see the person do it first | Settle conversion terms in the agreement before the placement starts. Negotiating a fee after you've decided you want to keep someone is a bad position |
Here is what actually happens between your phone call and someone clocking in.
The quality of a placement is decided in step one and step six — the brief and the first morning. Everything in between is logistics.
The difference between a good placement and a bad one is almost never the size of the agency's database. It is how specific the request was. A thin brief — "two general labourers, Monday, morning" — forces us to guess at half a dozen things, and every guess is a chance to be wrong.
What a strong brief contains:
In rough order of frequency:
The role on the floor isn't the role in the brief. Someone was requested for picking and is put on a packing line, or the "occasional lifting" is the whole job. The worker leaves, and it reads as an agency failure. It was a description failure.
Nobody was expecting them. The worker arrives at 6 a.m., the supervisor who requested them isn't in until 8, and no one at the door knows anything. Half of the no-shows we investigate are actually this in reverse — the person came, waited twenty minutes, and left.
The commute was never checked. A site that is a fifteen-minute drive can be a ninety-minute, two-transfer transit trip that doesn't run at 5:30 a.m. It works for two days on goodwill, then stops.
Rate ambiguity. The worker understood one number, the agreement says another, the premium was assumed. Almost always traceable to a verbal-only brief.
Silent drift. Nobody calls anybody. Small fixable problems — wrong boots, an unclear instruction, a personality clash on a line — compound for two weeks and then arrive as a resignation.
Four of those five are fixed by a ten-minute brief and a phone call on day two. That is the honest state of this industry: most failures are process failures, not people failures. Which is also most of what drives warehouse turnover.
Five questions. Any competent agency answers all five without hesitating.
Then check the fifth one on your first invoice. Vague invoicing is where the industry's bad actors live.
If the arrangement is working, at the one-month mark: the same people are coming back rather than a new face every week; your supervisor knows their names; the invoice matches your own hour count without a reconciliation exercise; you have had at least one honest conversation with the agency about someone who wasn't a fit; and you are deciding whether to convert one of them.
If instead you are getting a rotating cast, chasing hours, and re-explaining the job every Monday — that is not what temporary staffing is supposed to be. It is what it looks like when the brief is thin or the agency isn't doing the screening it's charging for.
If you are still weighing whether to use an agency at all, the more useful comparison is in agency or direct hire: how to choose — including the cases where the answer is honestly "hire directly." And if your volume moves with the season, the seasonal hiring calendar for Québec and Atlantic Canada covers how far ahead you need to be booking.
Labour standards, agency licensing and workers' compensation rules change, and they differ between Québec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Everything above reflects our understanding at the time of writing and is general information, not legal advice — confirm the current requirements with the CNESST, WCB Nova Scotia, WorkSafeNB, or your own counsel before relying on it.
The agency is. We hire the worker, pay them, remit source deductions, carry the workers' compensation coverage and handle the employment paperwork. You direct the work on site. In Québec, however, the client business can be held solidarily liable for pay owed under the Act respecting labour standards — which is why using a licensed agency matters.
Statutory employer costs (payroll taxes, workers' compensation premiums, vacation and holiday pay accrual), recruitment and screening, payroll administration and insurance, replacement risk when a placement doesn't work out, and the agency's own margin. On a general labour placement the statutory and administrative portion is usually the largest share.
For general labour and warehouse roles where we already hold an active pool, same-day or next-day is realistic if the request arrives with a clear brief. Roles needing a specific certification, a licence class, or a narrow software or equipment skill take longer — typically several days to two weeks.
Yes. Temp-to-hire is one of the most common arrangements: the worker starts on our payroll, you assess them doing the real job, and if it works you convert them to your own payroll under agreed terms. Settle conversion terms in the service agreement before the placement starts, not afterwards.
Yes. Site-specific hazards, equipment, emergency procedures and your own safety rules are your responsibility as the party controlling the workplace, regardless of who signs the paycheque. The agency handles general employment and coverage obligations; site-specific orientation cannot be outsourced.
Yes. Personnel placement agencies operating in Québec are required to hold a licence issued by the CNESST, and businesses are prohibited from retaining the services of an unlicensed agency. Ask any agency for its licence number before you sign — and verify it.
Ten minutes on the phone and we'll tell you what's realistic — including when the honest answer is that you should hire directly.