For Caroline Holley, taking a job after meeting the boss once makes about as much sense as agreeing to an arranged marriage. “It seems kind of insane, but that’s the way most decisions are made,” said Holley, a Brooklyn resident in her 30’s who worked as a temp before accepting a job as education and training administrator at the American National Standards Institute in Manhattan last year.

“Temp to perm” or “temp to hire” are industry terms for employees like Holley who work on a temporary status before becoming permanent employees.

“It’s a much better chance to get to know each other,” Holley said, noting that her temporary work status offered her the opportunity to size up the office culture before making a commitment to work there. It might be called workplace dating, and it is on the increase. “It’s snowballing,” said Marty Gargle, an owner of the Employment Line, a New York City staffing service that helped Holley find her job.

The service reports that close to 80 per cent of all new hires the agency placed last year were initially placed in temp jobs; five years ago, it was less than 30 per cent. Most placements are clerical and administrative workers, Gargle said, but increasingly they include midlevel managers and even executives.

The depth of the trend, at least officially, is not known. “It is not something that is tracked,” said Jim Brown, a labour market analyst for the New York State Department of Labour in Manhattan. Anne Accini, Gargle’s co-owner at the Employment Line, said temp-to-perm was a great way “to get to know if the boss is a pussycat or tiger.”

It is particularly good, she said, for people with poor or rusty interview skills ? “excellent workers but they just can’t interview to save their lives.”

Such hiring was rare in the 80’s, Accini said, but grew steadily during the hiring boom of the dot-com era in the 90’s. Then the bubble burst. Since then, said Richard Wahlquist, president and CEO of the American Staffing Association, “Companies have learned to hire much more strategically.”

Temp-to perm is a prudent way to do that. With the economy on the rebound, the demand for good workers is increasing as well and companies are having a hard time getting qualified applicants, Wahlquist said.

All this has been good for temporary workers, who are often hired to fill immediate needs and end up as permanent employees even though they did not initially seem like ideal candidates. Meanwhile, they can explore career options, make money while looking for the perfect job and exercise more control over their work lives. Unlike quitting or being fired, leaving a temp-to-perm job leaves no black mark.

Temp-to-perm placements include jobs that evolve into staff positions and those like Deane’s, which are expected to become permanent from the start. “It was such a good match from the beginning, that within a few weeks I knew it was going to be a good fit,” Deane said.

Jana Zabinski, one of his colleagues at the institute, who also started there as a temporary, was eager to get into public relations after working in the fashion industry. Although she had no experience in the field, she felt confident she could do the work. “How do you prove that if it is not written on your r?sum??” she asked.

Charles Griemsman, an editorial assistant at Harlequin, a book publishing house, worked in corporate communications after college but wanted to get in the door of a new industry. Even with a degree in English and American literature from Princeton University, he said, it was not easy. “The first day I was assigned to write blurbs for six books,” he said. “It was a practical route to where I need to be.”

But the “try before you buy” concept benefits employers as well. It’s less expensive than the traditional route, say experts because there is generally no fee to pay when a temp-to-perm employee is hired permanently. And employers do not incur costs of benefits like health insurance, unemployment liability or vacation pay during the temporary work period. The staffing service pays for whatever benefits temp workers get.

Susan Krause Liebman, director of human resources at Barnard College in Manhattan, called temp-to-hire “a very positive way to do it all around; it makes financial as well as ethical sense.”

Though the least expensive method of hiring is for businesses to bypass agencies and run ads themselves, working with an agency for a temp-to-perm worker is “less of a hassle,” she said. “We don't get deluged with r?sum?s, interviews and testing. And we end up with two strong candidates rather than 20 that have to be screened.”

Gary M. Sobo, a partner of Sobo & Sobo, a law office in Middletown, N.Y., said his firm also preferred to hire temp-to-perm workers, often waiting six months before making definite job offers. That period, he says, offers the “opportunity to explore all those things you couldn’t tell during the interview.”