10 Tips For Making Your First Hire
If you’ve been in business for a little while and are starting to get really consistent work, purchases, or clients, you may be starting to think about hiring out the first additional person to work with your business! If that’s you, by the way, CONGRATS!
Making your first hire can be a little intimidating and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be all that scary. You might be hesitant to hire out because you are worried you won’t find someone to be the right fit, that you don’t have the time to train someone, or because you think you have to be the one doing all the things in your business.
Can we just tell you - those things are not true! We’ve doubled the size of our team in the last 3 years, and it’s paid off in spades with the amount of collaboration, time, friendship, and business growth we’ve gained from those strategic hires.
When you start to hire out for your business, you can…
Lighten your workload and your stress levels
Offload extra work and tasks so you can focus on the things that will move your company forward.
Take on more clients or customers because you have more time and help.
Strengthen your company’s weaknesses because you're hiring experts to do things you’re not good at.
Make more money because you have more support, time, and manpower.
Build a team of people that understand you and your business that have your back!
Our Top 10 Tips For Hiring Your First Team Member:
1. Start By Making a Master List Of Tasks In Your Business
You can’t start the hiring process without knowing what your specific task needs are first. We love to use a Trello board for this process. Start tracking all the tasks YOU do every day to keep your business running. We’d recommend keeping track of this over the course of 1-2 weeks so you can really get a robust list going.
2. Make Sure This Role Is Something You Don’t Need To Do As The Business Owner
For your first hire, we recommend filling a role that is full of things that are super repeatable, and that don’t require any of your special knowledge, skills, or expertise as the business owner. These can be things like responding to the same kinds of emails, sending out purchases or orders, sending contracts or invoices to clients, doing project setup.
As you’re tracking this, also add tasks that you wish you had time to do, or that you’d like to be doing in the future for your business. Then, when you’ve tracked all your tasks, start separating out tasks that only YOU can do as the business owner. For example, speaking at conferences, being a guest on podcasts. If you need help deciding what’s essential for you to do, ask yourself the following questions:
What am I really good at?
What am I NOT so great at? (Hint, hire that out!)
What brings me joy to do?
What tasks drain you, your productivity, your creativity, or your inspiration? (Hint, hire these out too if you can!)
Once you have a list of tasks that absolutely must be assigned to you, you can look at what’s remaining, and start to divvy out tasks, jobs and projects that seem to be similar or could fit under one job title.
3. Start Your Manual or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) Document
After you have the list of tasks that you’d really like to hire out, start a Google Doc or any other type of document where you start listing instructions for actually how to do those tasks. Put your logins in there, where you find important files, email and contact information for yourself, and anything else that is important for someone who works regularly for you to know. Getting this started before you actually hire someone on really streamlines the training process so they can get started right away.
PRO TIP: If it’s something you can teach using a screen share in under 5 minutes, we love recommending Loom to film your screen (and your face!) and to quickly walk through how to do that task.
4. Create A Thorough Job Description & Put It On Your Website
If you’ve followed steps one and two, then you should really have a great idea of what tasks this first hire would take on, and hopefully even a good understanding of how much time per week or per month they would spend on the role.
For this first hire, we’d highly recommend skipping vague language in the role name and job description. Since you have a full scope of what the role is, find a name that’s a great fit for that person. Then, on a page on your website, include the following in the job description: the role’s title, the general role description, the time required, the job type (hourly, remote, salaried, etc), a bulleted list of tasks this role would do, the skills required, and the knowledge required.
5. Ask The People Who Know Your Business For Help
Ask your community (your clients, customers, and industry peers) if they know anyone who would be right for the position first. This generally helps you find someone who would already be familiar with your business or your niche.
6. Always Ask For A Phone Or Video Interview
Don’t communicate just through email before hiring. We have found that a call or video interview really separates candidates in terms of professionalism, and being able to tell right away whether they are a good fit to work with you. You’re going to be the person dealing with them day-in and day-out, so not only do they need to be a good fit, but you need to be able to get along with them, too.
7. Ask The Right Questions
Don’t head into an interview without being prepared yourself! Come up with a list of 10 open-ended questions to ask them! You may also want to have 2-3 logistical questions to ask them too (like availability, do they have the right equipment, etc).
Some of our favorite questions to ask during initial interviews are:
Why does this opportunity excite you?
What makes you feel like you’d be a great fit for this role?
What are you usually spending your time on when you’re not at your desk?
What was a work relationship with a coworker or boss that you really enjoyed, and why did you enjoy it?
Where do you see yourself in 3-5 years?
8. Don’t Be Afraid To Try A Test Project
Come up with a test project, and, if you can afford to, compensate your candidate for taking the time to complete it. We’ve done this with almost every role we’ve hired for. If you can, find something they can do to test a required skill or task list for the role. Maybe that’s doing a test design, a small marketing plan pitch, asking them how they’d respond to 5 different emails you get often. Taking this extra step ensures the candidate is thorough, follows direction, and has the right work style and ethic you’re looking for in the role.
PRO TIP: You can also hire someone on the contingency of a “trial period.” When we hire someone on for a trial period, we typically make that trial period 1-3 months. Schedule time with yourself to evaluate that new hire right before the trial period ends. That way, if it’s not a great fit, you’ve made it clear from the beginning that it would be a trial period.
9. Make Sure You Have Time To Onboard Your New Hire
For our team, it generally takes about one month to fully onboard a new hire. We’ve found that it helps to do this training through Zoom calls and shadowing for the most part, and start trickling in the tasks slowly over time rather than slamming them with a giant list of what needs to be done.
We also recommend sharing with them the purpose behind the role, what’s important to you as the business owner, your values as a company and entrepreneur, and share how it will serve you and your clients and customers. This helps give them a sense of purpose, ownership, and pride in the role too.
10. Go With Your Gut
Ultimately, no one knows what the right fit for your business is going to be better than you! Make sure you feel comfortable with the hiring decision and trust your gut when making that first hire. It can be scary to trust someone to come into your business with you, but think about all the ways it could benefit you, your business, and your clients and customers in the long run.
The Wrap Up
If you’re ready to make your first hire, you may love some of these blog posts about growing, expanding, or scaling your business.