Five tips to hiring your first employees
Once you have established a new venture, the first order of business is hiring the right personnel for it. Here are five tips for hiring your first employees.
From accounting to recruiting and everything in between, these professionals are the backbone of various critical departments across your operations.
But when you are hiring your first employees, you need to be extra careful with their skills, experience, and infrastructure. Otherwise, your business may run into unnecessary hurdles and stumble well before it can spread its wings.
Here are five tips for hiring your first employees to support you through this journey.
1) Get your housekeeping in order
Before you start hiring employees, you need to make sure that you are in good legal standing. This requires you to have an Employer Identification Number (EIN), which also happens to serve as your business’ Federal Tax Identification Number. Additionally, you need to set up your withholding tax records to remain up to date on tax obligations.
This paperwork and related measures ensure that your business is ready to welcome new employees from a legal standpoint. In turn, you can be confident in your employee onboarding for any position you want to fill, and this goes a long way towards maintaining an optimal business operation.
2) Draft coherent work contracts
Before you make an outsider a part of your work family, you need to ensure that both of you are ready to make the long-term commitment. That is where the need for coherent job descriptions and contracts comes into the picture. Having these documents in place prevents misunderstandings and protects you from a legal perspective.
To manage these contracts, you can look into free sign software. This lets you get your new employees’ signatures in a digital format, making it easier for you to handle these documents in the future. Besides record-keeping, this also makes sure that crucial information is available at your fingertips when you need it the most.
3) Make transparent job listings
When looking for your staff through a remote hiring platform or a traditional job posting website, you need to make your job listings transparent about the work involved. Instead of keeping your requirements under wraps until the interview, make it a point to outline your crucial demands within the job post itself, and this cuts through the clutter and only has highly serious candidates reach out to you.
This practice also goes a long way towards reducing your employee turnover rate. For instance, if you run a multi-level marketing (MLM) business, describing how much money you can make in MLM can attract all sorts of parties to your job post. But in case you want refined staff, you can put in specific qualifications or more demanding aspects of the job.
4) Use smart screening processes
Even when you want to steer clear of a plethora of candidates, you may still end up with more job applications than you need. You need to rely on automation to navigate this tall labyrinth of applications during this time. That is where you can utilize a resume screening tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify the process.
Through such a solution, you can bar applicants who use unnecessarily cheesy details or filler language in their job applications. You can also schedule initial interviews through phone and video before deciding on an in-person conversation. During this process, it helps to learn which remote interview mistakes to avoid to maintain your decorum at all times.
5) Get background checks done
If you are about to hire someone for a financially critical position, their history of financial crimes makes them a less than ideal candidate. But if you learn this fact after hiring that candidate, it might be too little too late to take any action by that time. That is why you need to conduct background checks on candidates that move past initial interview processes.
This allows you to steer clear of surprises while also helping you make informed decisions regarding the expansion of your team. The best part: Using such a background check service isn’t difficult at all, and you simply need to reach out to credible parties to receive reliable results.
By keeping these suggestions in mind, you can run and grow your business with the help of ideal employees. Besides fulfilling your short-term hiring requirements, this also gives you all the makings of long-term business growth.
Bonus tip: Systemise your onboarding process
It is crazy that 50% of new employees who failed to meet their performance goals did not have a formal onboarding process (SHRM, 2018) and this can be easily managed through simple onboarding tools for new employees. There are plenty of software platforms out there now that can help your business onboard your employees giving time back to your managers and HR teams.
