Hiring Your First Employees: What to Know

hiring your first employee

Being an entrepreneur, you might be the only one wearing all hats and building your startup. It’s easy to picture the journey of a business as an adventure but it’s tough to state what it took to be at the heights of success. The late-night brainstorming session, planning, research, and thinking about every matter is not an easy job at all. If you are thinking of hiring employees to divide your work, there is no better time than now. This way you would be able to keep the balance in your life outside the office.

How to Hire New Employees

Hiring employees is not an easy thing since you need to dive into a lengthy hiring process. This is the only way to have high-quality and potential candidates who can handle your desired work in the way you want. Before you start hiring, you should have covered some bases. Here are the important steps you need to take to hire the first employees.

Finalize The Positions for Which You Need Staff

This step is imperative to prevent redundancy in hiring many employees for just one position. So, you need to figure out the number of vacancies and the type of job. This can be done by looking at your current needs.

Have an Employer Identification Number (EIN)

This is an obvious step in the recruitment process. You should have an employer identification number before you start hiring new people. This can make things keep running smoothly.

Have Tax Payments and Insurance in Order

Once you hire new employees, you will be responsible to withhold a part of their salary for the purpose of social security and Medicare taxes and send it to IRS.

Being an employer, you are also responsible for keeping the tax records for at least four years. So, it’s crucial that you are ready to pay the right taxes once you have hired your employees. This needs to be done beforehand so that you don’t face any problems in arranging federal wage, tax statements, state taxes, and federal tax withholding later.

Apart from this, you need to make sure your business insurance covers workers’ compensation insurance. This is important for those businesses where employees will be engaged in manual labor.

Write and Post the Job Description

This is an exciting part of the recruitment of great candidates. Write a brief yet effective job description to clearly represent the needs of the position, salary, working hours, place, etc.

Next comes the posting of the job on the most prominent job sites. You can find so many hiring sites Monster, ZipRecruiter, and CareerBuilder. You just need to look for the site which has the potential to provide you with applicants having your required background.

Check All the Applications

Once you have received the applications within the due date, then it’s time to look for the potential candidates whom you want to call for interviews. Look at the resume first. You can immediately rule out anyone who is not qualified enough to join the workplace. Secondly, you also need to look for cover letters since it’s a great way to evaluate their working potential, experience, and interest in joining your business.

Call for Interviews

Interviews are another important step in the recruitment process. Before starting it, make sure you give your potential employees enough time to prepare. Inform the applicants about the interview date and time at least one or two weeks before. Briefly explain the things you will be interested to know during the interview.

While interviewing, make sure you are conducting fair interviews by asking all the candidates the same questions. This will help you to compare the potential of each candidate.

Evaluate and Hire

The last stage is following up with the interviewees and hiring the best candidate for the position. While deciding on the matter of the best candidate, don’t be blinded by any potential weakness. You need to take everything into account, resume, cover letter, and what you have seen in candidates. Maintain perspective and decide.

The interview evaluation stage is very important as you will be working with the potential candidates. Keep all the ducks in a row for each candidate and then make a decision.

Undoubtedly, your first hire requires a huge responsibility from you. It turns out to be a huge step in your company’s life. If you do things in the right way possible, you will surely end up having a better candidate who will be there for the long haul. You will see the greatest things in the early days after hiring a candidate.

Last but not the least, skills and experience are surely an important part of the hiring process. But you should also look for a candidate who is a cultural and personal fit for your company, and you as well. Moreover, your first employee should share your values. Not to mention, a passionate, hardworking, and experienced candidate can do wonders for you.

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