Reason #45: Temp-to-Hire’s Permanent Maybe

This is another common enemy of the mechanical engineer. Like the MET, it doesn’t look like a threat at first. It sounds helpful, even promising, a bridge to stability, a “foot in the door.” But once you’re on it, you realize Temp-to-Perm (AKA Temp-to-Hire) was built to move, not to hold.

You sign on for three months with the promise of six, maybe twelve, and then “conversion.” The badge is gray, the laptop is borrowed, and your email starts with a number. Everyone says this is how companies hire now. In mechanical engineering, they’re right. Contract staffing follows ME’s boom-and-bust cadence, so labs add hands for DV/PV sprints and unwind them just as fast. See Reason #15 and Reason #33.

The pitch sounds reasonable. Try before you buy. If the fit is good and budgets hold, they’ll make it permanent. What you live instead is an audition with moving criteria. You catch ECO cleanup because you can start tomorrow. You cover the off-shift because you’re “flexible.” The gate you keep alive is one you don’t own. Industry coverage has said the quiet part aloud: ME is particularly well suited to contract placements because projects surge and recede (Puente, 2023). Meanwhile, the staffing channel is massive, with 12.7 million temporary and contract workers placed in 2023 and penetration rates that employers watch like a weather report (American Staffing Association, 2024, 2025).

At-will employment already lets either side walk. So what is the employee’s benefit in temp-to-hire? Speed, maybe. Access, sometimes. Protection, not really. “Contract workers are usually not eligible for paid time off, health insurance, retirement accounts or other benefits that full-time employees receive.” HR guidance repeats versions of this because temporary and part-time staff often fall outside core benefit eligibility, and independent contractors lack many statutory protections altogether (Symplicity, n.d.; SHRM, 2023; U.S. DOL, 2024). You can buy your own coverage. That is the point.

Then the back end bites you. References and verifications run through a third-party agency with a name no background vendor recognizes. Your proof of work lives in disabled portals. You ask the agency for a letter and get a help-desk ticket. The client manager is happy to vouch for scope, but HR wants dates from whoever issued the W-2. You discover that the paperwork version of you is as contingent as the job.

Temp-to-perm can land. People convert. But the risk sits squarely on your side of the table. If the product hits its window, someone will pencil you in. If it slips, you slip out, and the audition resets at the next turnstile. The market calls that flexibility. You will call it expensive.

References:

American Staffing Association. (2024, Mar. 21). Staffing employment fell in 2023. https://americanstaffing.net/posts/2024/03/21/staffing-employment-fell-in-2023/

American Staffing Association. (2025). BLS monthly employment situation: Temporary help penetration rate. https://americanstaffing.net/research/asa-data-dashboard/bls-employment-situation/

Puente, J. (2023, Dec. 21). Contract staffing is popular, but has its downsides. ASME. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/contract-staffing-is-popular%2C-but-has-its-downsides

Symplicity. (n.d.). Employment laws for part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. https://www.symplicity.com/employers/campus-recruiting/resources/employment-laws-for-part-time-temporary-and-seasonal-workers

U.S. Department of Labor. (2024). Fact Sheet #13: Employment relationship under the FLSA. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/13-flsa-employment-relationship

SHRM. (2023, Apr. 12). Full-time to part-time: Educate employees about ramifications for benefits and compensation. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/employment-law-compliance/full-time-to-part-time-educate-employees-ramifications-benefits-compensation

Reason #44: Worse Than the Job Is No Job

You think it cannot get more demoralizing than being a mechanical engineer in today’s market. It can. Being a mechanical engineer without a mechanical engineering job is worse. The degree isn’t just a line on your résumé after six stretched years; it becomes your name tag. Then one day you are “unemployed engineer,” which reads like a punchline even to you. Oversupply did not just bruise your offers (see Reason #34). It erased your introduction.

The identity problem arrives first (see Reason #15). You trained to be the person who knows how things are made, and now you’re the person explaining a gap. Hiring managers do not hear “market correction.” They hear “why couldn’t you stick.” ME is supposed to be the broad degree that goes anywhere, except most elsewhere wants direct experience doing that elsewhere. Your portfolio is locked behind NDAs and disabled logins, so you can’t show the one fixture you nailed or the one system you debugged at 2 a.m. Software applicants ship demos; you redact filenames.

Then come the filters. HR sorts by last-title match and present-tense employment. Recruiters “circle back” when your last drawing release is older than their requisition. Meanwhile you are told to “keep skills sharp,” as if FEA seats grow on trees and chamber time is free. You chase contract gigs that only count if you already have them. Your old team forwards your “open to work” post with a sad emoji. The inbox fills with technician roles at your old pay minus benefits (see Reason #10).

The pivot stories sound inspirational until you live the part where you are junior again. Product manager interviews want customer wins you were never allowed to own. Manufacturing wants TPS playbooks that died when your plant moved. Sales wants accounts. Even the “adjacent” jobs quietly prize people who never were you. You will work harder to explain what an ME can do in their world than you ever worked to pass fluids (see Reason #8).

This is the quiet truth: the market can reduce a broad, proud credential to an awkward sentence you rehearse before every call. The work was invisible when you had it. And, it is invisible now that you don’t.