Last updated: September 10, 2026
Temporary Staffing Agency in Houston for Professional and Technical Roles
Coverage for IT, engineering and accounting seats that come with a date attached. In Houston, somebody else usually picked the date.
Talk to a Houston Recruiter
KORE1 is a Houston temporary staffing agency that handles professional and technical seats only, placing IT, engineering and accounting people around turnarounds, hurricane season and cutovers, with IT roles filled in 17 days on average.
Houston is busy. The Greater Houston Partnership’s July 2026 employment update counted 3,497,700 payroll jobs across the metro, up 50,300 from a year earlier, with construction and administrative support tied for the most growth. Administrative support is where temp-help payrolls get counted, for what that’s worth.
Here’s the call we get more than any other, give or take the details. A reliability manager on the east side of the Ship Channel, second week of January, with the spring turnaround seven weeks out. He needs two schedulers who live in Primavera P6, a cost controller, and an inspector holding an API 510 certification, and every one of them has to clear the site’s contractor orientation before the unit comes down.
The refinery picked that start date more than a year ago. It won’t move. So our Houston desk works backward. Fixed date first, then the lead time, then the search.
Pick the Page That Matches the Seat
KORE1 runs three pages that sound alike and answer different questions. Sort by the seat you’re filling, not the phrase you searched, and you’ll land on the right one faster.
You need a crew, not a specialist
Warehouse volume, a production shift, event staff, clerical overflow, or the craft labor behind a shutdown. Our national temporary staffing agency page handles general temp work in every market we serve, and the light industrial desk runs the floor side. Same company, different bench.
A professional Houston seat has a fixed date
Houston seats in IT, engineering, accounting and finance, tied to a turnaround, a storm season, a cutover or a close-out. Salaried-calibre professionals, billed hourly, with the first day and the last one both already on the calendar.
The chair is permanent
Then you want our Houston staffing agency page instead. It covers the full metro, permanent and direct-hire searches included, and it’s where to start if the seat’s shape is still up for debate.
Day two of site orientation. The unit comes down in nine days and nobody’s waiting on her.
The Seat Starts at the Gate, Not the Offer Letter
A signed offer doesn’t get anybody inside a refinery fence. On plenty of Houston sites, three things sit between the offer and the first hour of work, and none of them run on your hiring timeline, your candidate’s notice period, or anybody’s good intentions.
First, a TWIC card. The Transportation Worker Identification Credential is the federal ID for unescorted access to secure areas of maritime facilities, and a lot of plants along the Ship Channel fall under those rules. Most applications clear fast. TSA still tells people to enroll at least 60 days before they need the card, because some don’t clear fast at all.
Second, the site’s contractor safety process. OSHA’s process safety management standard names turnaround work specifically in its contractor section, so the host site has to vet the contract employer’s safety record, and the contract employer has to make sure each person it sends knows the unit’s fire, explosion and toxic-release hazards. Third, the operator’s own orientation and badging, which can take a morning or most of a week.
We put all three into the start date at intake, not on the Monday somebody’s supposed to begin. While the assignment runs, the person is a KORE1 W-2 employee. We run the payroll and the I-9 and carry the employment taxes and workers’ comp, and your managers run the work.
One line this desk doesn’t cross. No craft labor. Pipefitters, welders, boilermakers and scaffold crews come through the turnaround contractors who specialize in them, and we staff the planners, inspectors, engineers and accountants working next to that crew.
Both headline numbers are ours rather than a survey’s. The seventeen days comes from our technology desk, averaged over the trailing twelve months and every engagement type. The 92 percent counts every KORE1 placement, temporary and permanent, that’s still in the role a year later.
Four Dates Houston Employers Don’t Get to Pick
Most of our Houston temp calls trace back to one of four windows. They come around every year, which is the good news, because you can see each one coming months away. The rings show where they land and when we’d open the search. Those lead times are our desk’s working rule rather than an industry standard, built from how our own Houston searches have actually run, so read them as the latest safe start and not the ideal one.
- Fixed window
- Lead time
- Open the search
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Spring turnaround season
Late winter into spring · roughly Feb to Apr
Turnaround planners and Primavera P6 schedulers, cost and project controls, API 510 and 570 inspectors, reliability engineers, and OT support for control-system work booked into the outage.
Open the search in early November
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Atlantic hurricane season
June 1 to November 30 · the notch marks the Sept 10 peak
IT continuity and disaster recovery, field and desktop support, facilities and electrical engineers, and the accountants who end up owning the insurance claim.
Open the search in early April
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Fall turnaround season
Roughly Sep to Nov · straight through peak storm season
The same seats as spring, plus a written plan for what happens to the schedule if a storm pushes the startup.
Open the search in early June
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Turnaround close-out
Six to eight weeks after startup · May to Jun, Dec to Jan
Accounts payable and contractor invoice audit, cost reconciliation, project accountants, and joint interest billing on the upstream side.
Open the search while the turnaround is still running
The U.S. Energy Information Administration says refiners take planned outages mostly in the first quarter and the fall, when fuel demand runs lowest, and that a big turnaround can take a year or two of planning. It also notes they try to steer clear of holidays and hunting season. This is Texas. That second one is doing real work.
Now look at rings one and three against ring two. Fall turnaround season runs straight through the heart of hurricane season, which NOAA says peaks around September 10, and that overlap is where the storm clause in our Houston assignments comes from.
A close-out review downtown with a storm band parked over the skyline. They printed everything the night before. Houston habit.
Storms Move the Start Date. The Deadline Stays Put.
Hurricane Beryl came ashore near Matagorda early on July 8, 2024, only a Category 1, and by that afternoon more than 2.2 million people across the region had lost power, Houston Public Media reported. Six days later, fewer than 270,000 CenterPoint customers were still waiting on it.
For a temporary assignment, that’s not trivia. A storm can push a startup back a week, close an office for three days, or leave the person you placed on the wrong side of a flooded freeway right when the shift is supposed to start. Nobody’s fault. It still lands on the timeline.
So any Houston assignment running between June and November gets a short storm clause at intake. What happens to hours if the site shuts. Whether an IT or accounting seat can work remote through a closure. How the end date moves if the turnaround slips.
Ten minutes at intake. Worth it, because the alternative is an awkward conversation in week six.
Sometimes the window itself is the wrong frame. A seat running most of a year is really contract staffing, and one you already suspect you’ll keep is contract-to-hire. A whole workstream rather than a missing person is project staffing, and a chair held open during a permanent search is backfill coverage. And with no end date at all, direct hire costs less than pretending.
From the Ship Channel to The Woodlands
Greater Houston covers a lot of ground, and each part of it keeps a different calendar. Here’s how our recruiters split the metro. The same fixed-window approach runs through temp staffing in Dallas, our Los Angeles temporary staffing page, Orange County’s temp desk, professional temp staffing in Phoenix and our Austin temp staffing page, and each one is built around whatever actually sets the clock in that market.
The Ship Channel & East Side
Pasadena · Deer Park · La Porte · Baytown
The heaviest turnaround demand we see anywhere, because the largest petrochemical complex in the country runs along this water. TWIC questions come up here more than anywhere else we work. Ask on the first call whether the seat sits inside a regulated fence line, since that answer sets the start date.
The Energy Corridor & Westchase
Energy Corridor · Westchase · Katy
Operator and engineering-firm offices along I-10, doing the paper side of the same turnarounds. Planning, cost control, document control, and the project accountants reconciling all of it. Fewer hard hats. More Primavera.
Downtown & Uptown
Downtown · Galleria · Uptown
Corporate finance, treasury, and the accounting teams behind the public energy companies. Chevron said in August 2024 it was moving its headquarters to Houston and shifting corporate functions here over roughly five years, which has kept downtown finance and IT seats coming. Close-out and reporting work lands here more than anywhere.
Texas Medical Center
Medical Center · Bellaire · Braeswood
It bills itself as the biggest medical complex anywhere, and it runs on a clock of its own. EHR upgrades, systems go-lives and grant cycles set the windows here, not refineries. Hurricane planning is the one thing it shares with the east side.
The Woodlands & Spring
The Woodlands · Spring · Conroe
ExxonMobil finished moving its global headquarters to its Spring campus in 2023, and a good share of the engineering and supplier work around it followed north. Commutes from the south side run long, so for seats up here we recruit north of Beltway 8.
Clear Lake & the Bay Area
Clear Lake · Webster · League City
NASA’s Johnson Space Center anchors an aerospace contractor base where the fixed dates are contract and mission milestones. Plenty of these seats need a clearance or an export-control review. Both belong on the intake call, well before anyone talks about an offer.
The Houston Desks Behind This Page
Technology
Service desk, network, OT and security coverage for a cutover, a storm season or a turnaround’s control-system work. IT staffing in Houston.
Engineering
Reliability, inspection, process and project engineers, plus the planners and schedulers every turnaround runs on. Engineering staffing in Houston.
Accounting & finance
Close-out, AP and invoice audit, joint interest billing, and reporting seats that swell right after startup. Accounting staffing in Houston.
Enterprise systems
ERP and NetSuite analysts for a go-live timed around the outage calendar and storm season. ERP staffing in Houston and NetSuite staffing in Houston.
One Houston team runs all four, plus a data staffing desk in Houston for analytics seats, so a req filed under the wrong desk gets moved to the right one the same afternoon instead of starting over. For the national version of this work, the temporary IT staffing page and our temporary engineering desk cover every market we serve.
Common Questions
Which roles does your Houston temp desk actually cover?
Professional and technical roles only, meaning IT, engineering, accounting and finance, from mid-level specialists up through interim leads.
Turnaround planners and schedulers, cost controllers, inspectors, reliability engineers, service desk and network support, and project accountants for close-out make up most of it. Craft labor, warehouse and clerical requests get routed to other KORE1 teams.
How far ahead should we call before a turnaround?
Ten to twelve weeks before the unit comes down is our working rule for professional seats, and earlier if anybody needs a new TWIC card.
TSA itself tells applicants to enroll at least 60 days ahead. Add the site’s orientation and a notice period for someone finishing another assignment, and the math tightens fast. Six weeks can still work. It just shrinks who’s available.
How much does professional temp help cost per hour in Houston?
It depends on the role, but you’ll see one hourly bill rate per person, and it bundles the worker’s pay, employer taxes, workers’ compensation and KORE1’s margin.
There’s no separate placement fee and no charge for swapping in a replacement if a match doesn’t work. Our 2026 staffing pricing guide lays out current ranges by role in more detail than fits here.
Does hurricane season change how the assignment gets written?
Any assignment running between June 1 and November 30 gets a storm clause, which in Houston covers a lot of them.
It spells out hours during a site closure, remote fallback for IT and accounting seats, and how the end date moves if a turnaround slips. Beryl’s outages in 2024 ran for days across most of the metro, so it isn’t a hypothetical we pad contracts with.
Can we keep the person once the turnaround’s over?
Plenty of clients do, and a planner or cost controller who just learned your site is a good reason to.
Extending is usually just a new end date. Hiring them outright triggers a conversion fee, and that fee drops the longer they’ve worked the assignment. Mention it at intake if it’s even a possibility, since framing the seat as a contract-to-hire role tends to draw a stronger pool.
Who’s the employer, and who handles the site access paperwork?
KORE1 is the W-2 employer for the whole assignment, which puts payroll, tax withholding, workers’ compensation and the I-9 on our side of the line.
Site access gets shared. The candidate applies for their own TWIC card, your site runs its orientation and badging, and we schedule both into the start date so nobody discovers them on the first morning. Day-to-day direction stays with your managers.
How is this page different from your main Houston staffing page?
Scope, mostly. This page covers one job, professional and technical coverage with a fixed start and a known end.
Our main Houston page covers everything we do across the metro, permanent searches included. It’s the same team either way. Start here when a date set the clock, and start there when the seat is permanent or you haven’t decided yet.
Tell Us the Date You Can’t Move
Bring the turnaround date, the go-live, or the storm-season stretch you’re planning around. In half an hour we’ll work backward to when the search needs to open, what the seat should bill at, and which Houston recruiter will own it from intake to the last day.
Talk to the Houston Temp Desk