Worrying about Hiring an Interim into a Permanent Role?

Status and Seniority: If you've worked for yourself and / or held senior positions on an Interim basis, including Head of Department, Director, Programme or Project Director, for example, and been MD of your own company, why would you be happy with a lesser title?

• Having worked as an Interim for 20 odd years, job titles are pretty much irrelevant to me (and I've had many). I don't care what an employer or client wants to call me so long as they pay me (well) and allow me to do the job they hired me to. If that means I have to adopt a job title to enable me to do the job, and perhaps avoid upsetting the sensibilities of others, I'd be happy to do so.
• Let the work tell the story; judge me on results.

Interim or Perm: If you've been an Interim for such a long time, what has changed to make you consider or want to 'go permanent'?

• There used to be a significant demand for relatively short term, effective, even overqualified Interims, but the tightening of belts and constrained investment has reduced demand.
• There is an oversupply of people claiming to be Interims; many people still see the Interim lifestyle as high risk, and so avoid it, whilst others find themselves fishing in the Interim pool, after early retirement, redundancy or business failure, and the advice of so called outplacement consultants. These people are not Interims - they are people between jobs; their approach is different, they will rarely take risks, they are not necessarily problem solvers, and what they really want is a nice, safe, comfortable job, but they still dilute the pool and drive down fees.
• Lastly, and significantly, dividing lines have been blurred to obscurity with some significant differences in the tax treatment of Interims with Personal Service Companies and Employees on PAYE more or less disappearing.
• Interims are a fantastic flexible resource to major UK companies, infrastructure, business change, regulatory, growth, stop gaps, disaster recovery and continuity, etc. but as demand slackens, and supply continues to run to excess, the overall quality of resource is diluted.
• A significantly changed market place, as a result of the financial crisis, depression in Interim and Contractor fees, risk aversion, IR35 and other changes plus the plethora of red tape who wants to take care of their own sick pay, pension, holidays, car, Tax, etc ....
• Again there's really little, if any, difference in taxation for employed and self-employed, freelance executives; and if HMRC had their way there would be none:
• A salary of ￡100k, plus car, pension, Health Insurance, bonus, employer's NI, 33 days holiday, etc. is probably equivalent to an employment cost to the employer of around ￡150-175k. To earn that much as an Interim would mean having to gross around ￡200k over 40 weeks, spending ￡10k on expenses, ￡100k Tax & NI, ￡10k pension, etc. with all the attendant risks and uncertainty. With people keeping their heads down and mouths shut, and hanging on to their jobs, Interim oportunities and most of all fees have come under enormous scrutiny and pressure.
• You can always terminate an Interim contract, but not so easy to release permanent staff, and with the right agreement, you only pay for what you use, and when the job's done - and it will be; a lot more quickly than by permananet staff - you can keep costs under control sound in the knowledge that if you need more help, there's always good help in the Interim market place.