Hiring the right talent for your business is central to its success in the future. Employees are the brand of a startup company because they will represent your business to others. By hiring the right employee/assistant, who respects customers and co-workers alike, you’re cultivating the best customer service experience in the market. Candidates with professionalism, critical evaluation, and problem-solving approach are essential in establishing your business reputation. Your employees are the face of your business, so hiring qualified candidates is one of the best things you can do to ensure success from the start. As a startup company, employers make many mistakes during the hiring process. But you can avoid these mistakes by keeping the right things in mind.
This article is a guide for entrepreneurs to help in hiring the first employee for their business. After reading this article, you will learn five things an employer should know while hiring the first employee.
1) Stay Focused on your ideal candidate: Before hiring an employee for your company, you should have a clear picture of your ideal candidate in your mind. Unless you know the characteristics of a great employee suitable for the specific position, it is difficult to identify those traits in the employees you are interviewing. Do not hire someone based on unimportant skills. For example, if a candidate can speak six different languages, that’s impressive. But it’s not the reason to hire them if you are looking for a brand manager. Just stay focused on the right characteristics of the employee for a specific position and then find them.
2) Do not hire with Long-Term Contracts: When you start a business, there are a lot of problems that you don’t know how to solve. You hire the people who have the expert knowledge to help you. You can evaluate the problem-solving skills of the employees in the short-term. So, by doing this, you have the option of not being stuck to the employees who won’t work out in the future. Once the short-term contract is over, you can easily separate ways without wasting more of your payroll budget. If someone has proved to be a quality performer, you can find other projects or ways to incorporate them into the business.
3) Know the employee costs: Hiring candidates involves more than paying the salary. So, before hiring an employee, check your finances and keep in mind the other expenses of employees. Keep in mind the 6.2% of social security tax of employee’s salary, worker’s insurance, medicare tax that is 1.4% of base salary, Federal unemployment tax, and state unemployment tax.
4) Do not assume your employees know what’s in your head: One of the biggest mistakes employers make is that they expect their employees to know everything related to the project and the company itself. Be very clear when explaining your process, expectations, and goals. If possible, arrange training sessions, design documents, and videos outlining how to complete specific roles. Be mindful that it will take some time for the employees to understand your company’s culture completely.
5) Think one step forward to the employees: Companies are always in search of skilled candidates to fill their positions. So, if you have a highly qualified employee in your company, sometimes it becomes difficult to stick them with you in the long run if he has got a better package than yours. An employer must keep the qualified candidates engaged and continue offering them some incentives to stick them around.
