If you thought finding good entry-level help was tough in this competitive recruiting market, try locating a driver with special skills — a guy who won’t mind hooking on to a hazardous load because he’s done it a thousand times, or half of a team that can get expedited freight from Toronto to Vancouver in a flash. Now try hiring this driver at the last minute. Bon chance.

The good news is that you can find talented driving help at a personnel agency. There are solid strategic reasons to turn to temps. They give you flexibility in your workforce, and the agency is typically responsible for the daunting administrative costs associated with having an employee of your own, including recruiting, hiring, training, and payroll costs.

However, you continue to hear of fleets and owner-operators that turn to personnel agencies or “driver services” and trip over the blurry line of whether that temporary worker is in fact an employee. The consequences of misclassifying a worker can be severe — you’ll have tax, labour, and worker’s comp officials beating a path to your door, and companies have collapsed under the weight of stiff penalties and demands for payment of taxes owed.

Worse, a few personnel agencies tell unwitting drivers that they’re independent contractors, able to deduct business expenses from their tax liability. Unfortunately, they neglect to explain that these drivers are also responsible for their own payroll deductions.

That said, trucking is an ideal industry for the temporary help market. Most fleets experience ups and down in their work cycle at some point during the year, either a seasonal bump in freight volumes or a surprise order. With driver turnover so high, agency drivers can slot in as contingency workers when positions are unexpectedly vacant. And temps are potential full-timers. If a driver is good at the job, you may be able to arrange with the temp service to hire the person on a permanent basis.

If you use plan to temporary drivers, here are some pros and cons to consider as you evaluate suppliers:

Administrative work. A driver supplier should provide more than just two hands to hold a steering wheel. The idea is to outsource the expense and administrative headaches associated with running an internal human resources department. If you’re the HR guy at a private fleet or a 10-truck for-hire operation, you’re probably also the safety manager, driver trainer, and you may even hop in a truck yourself from time to time. With an agency, you’ll want to save some money and get a more professional HR job in the process.

compliance. It’s the agency’s job to make sure its drivers abide by the various regulations that affect them, including drug and alcohol testing, compliance reviews, and training. “That,” says Kathy Lefroy, director of operations at In-transit Personnel in Mississauga, Ont., “is a major consideration for many of our clients. They outsource the hiring simply because we can do a better job of finding the right person for the job and looking after all the employment requirements properly.”

where do these guys come from? Most personnel agencies use newspaper ads, job fairs, and word of mouth to attract candidates. They usually have a stable of full-time truck drivers, but may make good use of part-time drivers such as firefighters, airline pilots, and police officers whose schedules give them lots of time between shifts.

There are differences, however, in how firms screen drivers before hiring. Some evaluate drivers in detail, using a combination of aptitude and skills tests and personal interviews to make sure the driver will be matched to the right job. Others take ’em as they need ’em, doing no better than you could if you’d handled recruiting and hiring yourself.

There’s a lot of pressure on personnel agencies to a) maintain a client base to employ their drivers, and b) continually find drivers who can do the work. “We get lots of calls for different types of experience, anything from LTL to pin-to-pin work, tankers, or even route drivers. That gives us a lot to offer a driver, but it really gets us scrambling to find specialty skills when those calls come in,” says Lefroy.

Am I getting my money’s worth? There’s an unfortunate perception that agencies simply take money from the carriers, skim a percentage, and give what’s left over to the driver.

According to Kieran J. O’Briain of Kee Transport Human Resources in Mississauga, Ont., the costs of managing, recruiting, covering payroll, and making a small profit aren’t much different from the costs the carrier would incur directly if the whole process was managed internally.

For example, it may cost a carrier $15.50 an hour to pay an employee driver $13 per hour. The extra $2.50 covers the employer’s various source deductions. A personnel agency, in this case, might bill the carrier $16.50 an hour while covering all the employee costs, plus its own overhead and a small profit, while still maintaining the driver’s $13-an-hour wage.

“We can take a lot of costly functions off the carrier’s plate,” O’Briain, says, “and still pay the going rate to the driver. We deal in economies of scale, and we make our money by doing the job efficiently. We don’t do it at the driver’s expense. If we did, how long would we be able to keep attracting drivers?”

As Lefroy points out, driver services need drivers, and to attract good help they have to be competitive, maybe even more so than the carriers because they’re competing for the same pool of drivers. Otherwise, all the good drivers would be looking elsewhere.

What using a temporary agency won’t do is alleviate you from potential employment law liability. You still need to be aware of and comply with labour and employment laws. Whether you’re dealing with a temp or one of your own, that’s a full-time responsibility.There are plenty of personal reasons why hiring your kids or your spouse is a minefield, but there is at least one potential benefit. It’s a tax strategy called income-splitting: you distribute business profits among family members who worked for you along the way and helped generate the returns. By spreading the profits around, you may be able to reduce your tax burden by shifting money from a high-income earner to a person with little or no income.

Before your wheels start spinning, remember that the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency says you can pay yourself and your family members a nice salary as long as it is “reasonable compensation” for the work done. The problem with that, friends, is that “reasonableness,” like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

You need a strategy if you want to pay a family member a share of net revenues. Here are three.

1. Pay a percentage of profit. If you’re self-employed (not incorporated), you can split the profit (or the bottom line of your profit and loss statement). Use the income statement normally used to prepare your personal income tax return for both you and your partner (for example, your spouse). Include a copy of the statement with both of your T-1s ; the percentage split should show the portion to be included on each of your personal income tax returns.

2. Dividends. If you’re incorporated — your company operates as a separate legal entity-consider offering dividends. A Canadian, filing single, without other income or deductions, may earn up to about $25,000 in dividends without paying any personal income tax.

3. Wage or salary. You’re putting your kid or spouse on the payroll. As such, there are tax and legal obligations. Be careful how you calculate employment deductions: the family member in question may not be eligible for EI and/or CPP. Also, you don’t have to follow your usual pay cycles (weekly, biweekly, etc.); a lump sum salary paid at the end of the year is an option.

As for how much income to split, CCRA says your decision must be based on each individual’s performance within the company, your logic must be solid and documented and carry over from year to year, and what they are paid must be reasonable for the work performed.

If you think the amount you’ve chosen to split with a family member seems unreasonable, it probably is. A seven-year-old son who earns $35 an hour “detailing” the truck is going to raise some eyebrows.

Don’t underestimate contributions, either. That mileage log from the company service vehicle is a way to back up your claim for your spouse’s hours spent providing admin services to the company.

To survive a tax audit, you must hold strong convictions about the value and worth of your family members’ participation to the business. Be prepared to back your convictions with documentation. Put some thought into the income splitting between family members at the beginning of a reporting period; don’t try to arrange a haphazard formula after your year-end. Put an agreement in place at the beginning of your fiscal reporting period outlining your decisions behind income splitting.