Whether it’s your first employee or your hundredth hire, bringing new people into your small business is always a little scary. You want to make sure you choose qualified candidates who exemplify your core values and drive your business forward. But how do you navigate the steps of the hiring process to reach your desired end goal?
The first step is to remember that it’s not all about who, it’s also about when. You have to make sure you have the need for an employee and the ability to financially support them. A successful hire comes in when your business is ready to grow and the hire can contributes to that growth.
A reliable hiring process helps you decide when to hire, who to hire and how to find them. Let’s go through each step of the process to help you decide if it’s time to start looking for your next employee.
The guidelines for when to hire an employee will change as your business grows. Your first hire will fill a different role from your fifth and so on. There are, however, some universal indicators that it’s time to add a new employee to your team.
If you and your team are at capacity but consistently receiving opportunities for profitable work, then it’s time to find a new hire for your company. It’s often tough as a small business to turn down business, so you need to ensure you have enough people in your organization to handle your reliable workload. Adding a person increases your overall bandwidth and makes room to onboard new clients.
Note: In some industries (like marketing), workload can fluctuate significantly. You want to build a team that can handle your reliable baseline of work, not a team for the busiest season. If you hire for your busy season, then eventually you’ll end up with more employees than you can realistically support during slow times. Build a strong but lean foundation of full-time team members and look into using freelancers and/or contractors when you have extra work.
Another indicator is if you and your team are frequently losing productivity time to non-essential tasks, such as answering emails, creating invoices or other administrative duties. These tasks are critical to keep your business running, however, they don’t generate revenue and can be a time vacuum for your organization.
If you notice that you or your team is regularly losing chunks of time to back office or administrative work, consider hiring someone who can manage all that for you. This will free up your team to focus on their clients and often means that administrative tasks are completed with more accuracy and efficiency because one person’s entire job is dedicated to them.
You always want your customers to feel confident in their partnership with you. Unfortunately, when you’re pushing yourself and your team to its limits, little things will start falling through the cracks and your customer service might suffer. If you start seeing more customer complaints or questions about quality than normal rolling in, it often means your staff is facing one of the previous two issues we’ve discussed.
When customer service starts slipping, onboarding the right candidate can make all the difference. There are a couple of ways you can approach this hire:
This is a much more exciting reason to hire employees. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s critical to first confirm that you have a demonstrated demand for the new services you want to offer. Ask yourself these questions:
As you expand into new areas, the revenue from those products or services will support the payroll and additional expenses for your new employees. You don’t want to hire people and realize later that no one is buying what you’re selling. Take the time to do your due diligence, then consider the size and type of staff you’ll need to fill this hole.
Another common hurdle of expansion is that your team might lack the unique skill sets needed to offer new services. This is a great opportunity to rely on contractors or third-party companies as you get your service off the ground and solidify your process. You can pay for only the work you need and ensure a high-quality end result.
As more contracts come in, you can consider hiring a part-time employee to start managing your service in-house. Eventually, you’ll have enough work for a full-time employee and can even transition your part-time person or contractor (if they’re interested). Which leads us neatly in our next section…
This question can be interpreted two ways:
Both are important considerations to ensure you choose the best candidate who will be a valuable addition to your business. Let’s look at each of these considerations separately.
The open position you choose to advertise will be based on the business’s needs and your needs as the agency owner.
There are some aspects of your business that you love — helping clients, selling solutions, managing operations — and, inevitably, others that you’re not too crazy about. Additionally, there are some things that must get done for your business to succeed. The key to choosing which position to hire is to balance these needs and find someone who can fulfill them.
To do this, I like to use two different matrices. The Covey Matrix helps you determine what your business needs by ranking tasks based on their importance and urgency.
When deciding what position to hire for, you should prioritize the important and urgent tasks that you or your team don’t have time to do, don’t have skills to do or don’t enjoy doing. This will show you what role will best support your business and existing staff.
As a fellow business owner, I know how tough it can be to decide which roles to delegate and which to keep for yourself. That’s why I use another matrix to help me assess where someone can be the most help with shoring up my personal weak points.
The first place to look is the bottom right square; finding someone who can handle things you’re not good at and/or don’t enjoy doing can take a lot of stress and headache off your plate. I keep ownership of the things that I’m good at and love doing because that’s where I find the most fulfillment and am the most successful with.
Note: I’d highly recommend confirming through feedback from others around you what you are actually good at.
Potential employees should meet the criteria you identify in each of these matrices.
Once you’ve decided what position to fill, you have to consider what type of person would be the best fit for the job. For some small business owners, this is a tough step. You might be tempted to hire someone who’s just like you, but really you need someone who complements your skills and personality.
There are a few critical things to consider when evaluating potential candidates:
It’s often helpful to outline your requirements for each of these areas before you create your job posting. When you know exactly what type of person you’re looking for, you can craft your listing to attract those people and often improve the quality of candidates who apply.
To note: sometimes the first hire in any organization is a “me too” hire, basically someone that is just like you. Since you really are looking for someone that can wear lots of hats and you often don’t have enough work for a specialist role yet.
You’ve done the hard work of deciding it’s time to hire someone, figuring out what position you need to fill and determining the right kind of person for the job. Now it’s time to go find them!
The hiring process might seem daunting, but really it’s just three basic steps: writing a job ad, posting it online and evaluating applicants.
You might not think of it, but job ads are a great place to use the StoryBrand Framework. Applying to a job is a big decision that often impacts a person’s identity or view of themselves.
Using StoryBrand helps you to empathize with job seekers’ problems — left a job that wasn’t a good fit, looking for a specific culture, wants more responsibility, etc. — and demonstrate how your company can fulfill their needs.
Aside from StoryBrand, there are a few key points you need to hit in your ad so potential candidates know what to expect from you, your business and the role.
Learn more about how to write a great job ad in this HubSpot article.
The next step is figuring out where to put your job ad so that the right candidates find it and apply. Every job board touts they “attract the top talent” or “make hiring easy,” but the truth is that the best platform for you will probably depend on your business.
When I hire employees, I first look to referrals from my network and post paid job ads on LinkedIn. I find, for my company, this is where we find the most qualified applicants and have the most success.
Aside from that, there are a handful of job websites that I like to use for posting specialized ads, which can be great if you’re hiring for a specific role.
After you post, you’ll start seeing applications roll in. The first round of evaluations is simply reviewing resumes and applications to see who might be a good fit. In this step, you want to focus on quantitative markers like education and experience. This will give you an idea of who’s most likely to be qualified for the role.
Next, you’ll start the interview process. Any good interview process has multiple rounds where the applicant meets and interacts with different members of your team. The first meeting is often with human resources, a hiring manager, a team manager/director or even yourself. Interview questions at this stage should stay high-level and related to their previous experience. You can dig into personality and values a little bit, but you want to focus on confirming resume information and qualifications.
Second-round interviews are typically with the person who will be their manager, if hired. This gives your team manager a chance to assess if the person is a good match for the team and familiar with or able to adapt to existing processes. It’s also a chance for them to get to know the person and feel out if their personality and values are a good match for the company.
In the final round(s), candidates should meet some other members of your team so you can see how well they get along and if they’d be a natural fit in your business. Throughout all these interviews, it’s important to provide ample opportunities for applicants to ask questions about your company. Be sure to always give honest answers so they can make an informed decision of whether or not you’re the right fit for them. Remember, a successful hire is a mutual decision.
Hiring employees is a big step in your business, so you want to make sure you’re financially prepared to bring in someone new.
There are three major financial considerations to take into account before making a job offer:
It’s critical that you do the math for each of these areas beforehand so you know for certain that you can support another team member without putting your business at risk.
You can tell from the size of this blog that hiring employees is no small task. It’s a detailed process, but if you approach each step with care and intentionality, you’re sure to make a great hiring decision.
New employees should always support the tasks that drive your business forward and lead to long-term success. For more tips on how to run a successful business and hire top talent, sign up for my newsletter!
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