Staff Leasing in Ukraine: How to Set Up Temporary Workers for a Project

What staff leasing actually is

Staff leasing means bringing in workers who stay on the staffing agency's payroll the whole time, while physically doing the work at the client's site. Unlike outsourcing, where the contractor owns both the process and the result, leasing is mainly about people: the client manages their day-to-day tasks directly, while the agency handles the paperwork, payroll, and HR records.

How leasing differs from hiring directly

The key difference is that there's no employment relationship between the client and the worker. The person signs an employment contract with the staffing agency, and the client simply buys their working hours under a staff-provision agreement. That removes the client's employer obligations under labor law — vacation pay, sick leave, termination — leaving only day-to-day task management on site.

When leasing beats other staffing models

Leasing fits best when the need for people is clearly time-bound — a project, a season, covering for staff on leave — and hiring permanently afterward wouldn't make sense. Unlike a one-off mass-hiring push, leasing doesn't require the client to run a separate recruitment process at all: the agency deploys ready workers from its own pool for the specific task.

How the setup actually works

The staff leasing agreement fixes the crew size, the duration, the cost per hour worked, and the terms for scaling the headcount up or down. The agency employs the workers directly, handles payroll and HR administration, and bills the client only for hours actually worked — with no extra recruitment or paperwork cost on the client's side.

Who's responsible for what

The agency is responsible for legal employment, timely pay, and HR records. The client is responsible for working conditions and site-specific briefing, since that's where the person physically does the job. This split is worth spelling out as its own clause in the contract, so a problem on site always has a clear owner.

Typical use cases

Staff leasing is most common on projects with a hard deadline, during seasonal peaks in a warehouse or on a production line, and for covering staff who are temporarily out. In each case, a permanent hire would create obligations that outlast the actual peak or project.

Staff leasing from ASHA Ukraine covers a temporary need for people with no labor-law obligations on your side, while staff outsourcing fits better when you also want to hand off day-to-day management of the work itself.