What its like working with Arts Temps: Ben Winyard - Digital Content Manager, UAL

Our teams love working with our talented and innovative temps, we talked with Ben Winyard, UAL's Digital Content Manager, about the temps he has worked with and why they have been a vital part of his team...

Hi Ben, so you’ve had a few temps work closely with you in the Digital Content Team, tell me about the different temps you’ve recruited?

We’ve worked with 4 temps over the last few years: Daniele, Erika, Anastasia and Zainab. All of them have been truly excellent. In fact, Daniele started off as a temp, but has since became a permanent member of the team.

We joke that we try and cling onto our temps for as long as possible, but they bring such unique perspectives to the work and it’s a real joy seeing them flourish and succeed.

It’s fantastic to have this resource where I know that I can quickly hire temps who are ready to apply themselves fully to the work we provide them. They totally get what we were doing and how our team works; and they have all just slotted into the team so seamlessly.

What sort of roles do you recruit temps for?

We generally hire the temps to cover specific roles within the team, for instance Digital Content Assistants; or we often hire temps to provide additional support on projects.

For example, last year we had a big project with a whole redesign of our website, there were thousands of webpages that needed to be redesigned. To support us we hired Anastasia through Arts Temps, she comes from a design background and she just got the whole project straight away - she got to grips with our CMS and all the elements of the new design so quickly.

As hiring managers, we really trust that our temps can do the work and we want them to bring that creative flair to their work.

So, what is it that makes UAL’s temps so great to employ?

We hire arts temps because we want to use the skills they’re taught as students. They also bring a real can-do attitude and creative problem-solving skills, which are invaluable. Primarily for us, those who come from a design or illustration background have a really great eye for design and layout. It’s super helpful when you're creating webpages and we've been able to really lean on those skills to get the best out of them.

They have such a great understanding of design and all of those amazing things that they learn at UAL, but they just also bring really wonderful enthusiasm and energy to the role. All of the temps we've worked with have really made their mark.

Now we’re opening Arts Temps to external businesses why do you think they should employ through Arts Temps?

Arts Temps is such an easy and flexible service: I can raise a request and be onboarding a temp in a few days if I need to. The Arts Temps team are really helpful and supportive through the whole recruitment process as well.

But I think the main reason to recruit through Arts Temps is the temps themselves. The UAL students and graduates bring such an inspiring combination of skills and a really unique perspective, both from their studies and from their personality.

Most importantly, they have just all been really lovely people that we've really enjoyed having as part of the team. We try to hold onto our temps for as long as possible and we encourage them to apply for permanent positions, whether it's in our team or somewhere else at UAL, because we know that they are a huge benefit to the organisation.