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3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Hiring Your First Employee

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Hiring a First Employee|3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Hiring Your First EmployeeHiring your first employee is a big step for a new business. Things are going well and the workload is increasing so you think that now is the right time to start bringing more people on board, but that isn’t always the case. If you start expanding the business and hiring people too early, you might end up in a difficult financial situation and it could be the end of the business entirely. You may also find that you hire the wrong person if you rush into things without really thinking about it properly first. If you want to avoid getting it wrong, you need to ask yourself these 3 questions before you hire your first employee.

Why Are You Hiring Them?

This is important and it seems like an obvious question but a lot of people don’t actually think about this before they start hiring people. If your answer to this question is simply that you’re making more money and the business is getting a bit bigger so it seems like the right thing to do, you probably aren’t making the right choice. You should be hiring employees to help in specific areas where you’re struggling. For example, if you’re struggling to handle the volume of sales that you’re seeing and you need a sales rep to take on some of that workload, that’s fine. Or maybe you aren’t very good at digital marketing and you think that the company would benefit from having somebody with more experience do it, that’s a great reason to hire somebody. Before you jump into anything, consider how hiring a new employee will actually improve the business in a specific way. If you can’t think of anything, it’s not the right time to start hiring.

Can You Actually Pay Them?

A lot of people have a good month and then decide that they’re financially stable enough to pay an employee. Then they hire somebody and the following month sales dip again and they’re struggling to find the money. It’s best to wait until you’re seeing stable growth over a period of a few months before you decide to hire somebody, and try to put some money aside to cover their salary for a while.

You don’t just need to think about whether you can afford to pay them, you need to think about the actual process of paying them. In other words, do you have a payroll system in place? You’ll need some software to handle that for you and choosing the best payroll software for your business isn’t something that you can just do overnight. If you don’t understand how to deal with payroll yourself, that’s a big problem as well and you’ll need to hire somebody to do that first. If you rush into it and find that you can’t actually pay your employees, you’re going to have a big problem on your hands.

Do You Have A Clear Hiring Process?

Hiring an employee is a lot harder than you might realize. You’re going to get a lot of applications and you need to know how to narrow it down to a few candidates for interview and then choose the perfect person. If your process isn’t good, your first employee won’t be the right fit for the position and you’ll be wasting money. So, before you do anything, you need to sort your hiring process out and make sure that you know how to pick the right candidate.

If you can’t confidently answer all of these questions, it might be best to hold off for a while before hiring your first employee.

How To Check Out A Potential Employee Before Hiring Them

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Hiring An Employee|How To Check Out A Potential Employee Before Hiring ThemWhen you are hiring an employee and looking through applications, you need to check that they have the relevant experience and qualifications to do the job. Once they get to the interview stage, you will also be trying to get a feel for whether they are a good fit for the company and whether they will work well with the rest of the team. If all goes well, you may decide to offer them the job. But there is one more step that you need to take before that.

Even if a person seems great on the surface, you don’t really know much about them, which is why you need to conduct background checks to ensure that they are reliable and they are not going to endanger your business in any way. If you are unsure what you are looking for, these are some of the things that you need to check.

Employment History

Looking at somebody’s employment history is a good way to get a sense of how reliable they are. If they only stay at jobs for a few months and there are a lot of big gaps in their employment history, that is not a good sign and they are likely to let you down. If you click here to visit this website, you can request copies of employment records so you can check that there is nothing to be concerned about. If there is something that you are unsure about, you should always ask the candidate. They may have a reasonable explanation and that is fine, but if they do not, you should reconsider your decision to hire them.

Social Media Check

A person’s employment history gives you a clearer picture of their professional life, but you should also check out their social media pages to see what kind of person they are outside of work. If you see any evidence of illegal activity on there, for example, you know that this person is not a good hire for your company. It can also give you some insight into their personality and help you decide whether they will fit in with the rest of the team.

Criminal Record Checks

Employment history and social media checks help you to get a feel for the kind of person that you may be hiring and they are important. But criminal record checks are even more important because they are a matter of safety. It is your responsibility to ensure that all of your employees are safe, so you need to avoid hiring anybody that has a violent past and could pose a safety risk. A criminal record check will let you know about any previous convictions, and even though you should not necessarily discount everybody with a criminal record, it is important that you make an informed decision.

Credit Checks

Credit checks are becoming more common during the hiring process because they can be an indication of how reliable a person is. If somebody has terrible credit, that suggests that they are not the most reliable person in the world and you should reconsider hiring them. Don’t base your entire decision on this, but it is something worth looking at.

As long as you do these important checks on a potential employee before hiring them, you can ensure that you are making the right decision.