Contractor to Perm
Have they aver asked you to go from contractor to perm? Should you take a contract where they want you to turn Permie after 6 months?
Part 9 in the series Hitting Agents for Six.
Permie Role
Another subject that might be brought up by the agent, before the interview, is that the agent might say that the company will recruit a contractor, but with the view to wanting the contractor to turn permie after 6 months.
A lot of IT contractors turn this down straight away, but this may well be an opportunity for you.
You have a six month contract offered, with few competitors/ Also, there is no legal compunction for you to turn permie after 6 months.
If you are doing well, the company will want to keep you.
In normal circumstances you wouldn’t want to turn permie.
Financial Commitments
What you can do at the end of the six months is to say that you have certain financial commitments which you made before, and which would put you in financial difficulty if you had to turn permie now. However, they would have lessened in, say, another six months.
They will usually agree to another ‘temporary’ six months.
Once you’ve been at the company for a year, you tend to find that things have changed. Maybe your boss has moved on, been sidelined, or been promoted. Perhaps there is a freeze on hiring new permanent staff. Furthermore, maybe there is only budget for IT contractors or a dozen other reasons.
If the worst comes to the worst, you can always say that, in the intervening year, you have changed your mind about going permanent. However, you hopethey keep you on as a contractor.
The worst that can happen is that you’ve had a year’s contracting money out of it.
If you are doing a good job, and now that you have a year’s experience of the place, the chances are that they will keep you on. And you would have had pretty much a free run at the interview in the beginning.
You should savour these ones, where they want you to go from contractor to perm after a certain amount of time. Most contractors turn them down flat.
