It seems easier to start your own business now that you have so many tools and platforms at your disposal. However, a significant challenge you may not have thought about is hiring employees to help you with your business.

When hiring your first employees, you must ensure you can afford to pay them and fulfill all the legal obligations. Once everything is ready, post a job ad including all the necessary information and screen the candidates. Pick your new employee and explain their duties in detail.

In the rest of this article, I will cover all the necessary steps you need to take to hire your first employees and include useful tips and suggestions to help you make the right decisions.

Decide To Hire Your First Employees

The hiring process is more complicated than you think, especially for someone doing it for the first time. You need to ask yourself if hiring extra employees is necessary and if you and your business are ready to welcome them. For both questions, you must look closely at everything surrounding your business.

If you have a small business that you used to manage perfectly by yourself, but you’re struggling to keep up with its growth, you need to hire someone to help. You should also consider hiring someone if you’re introducing a new product or service you don’t know how to make or do yourself. Eventually, most businesses will need extra people as they grow.

You should also determine whether you can afford to hire your first employees. The financial state of your business and its growth rate should help you decide if you can hire anyone and, if yes, how many people you would need.

Prepare for Hiring Your First Employees

Once you’ve decided to hire your first employees, you must prepare for the potential applicants and fulfill your legal duties as an employer. This includes applying for Employee Identification Numbers, buying insurance, registering with your state’s labor department, and more.

You also should determine the duties, salary, and benefits of every position you offer. Since you haven’t hired anyone before, you might need some guidance, so do your research or ask for help from other business owners you might know.

You also should create an employee handbook, which will guide your employees about their duties and rights and other company policies. Another important step is ensuring workplace safety measures are in place, especially if your business involves potentially dangerous processes.

Screen the Candidates

To attract potential employees, you need to post the job on the appropriate sites. The post should include the necessary skills and qualifications a candidate should have and the position and benefits. You can also include the salary or the salary range if you’re willing to negotiate.

Once you post the job, you will start to get responses from people who might be interested in the position you’re offering. Ideally, you will get several candidates for each position you’re offering so that you can choose the best one out of them. However, even if you only get one answer, you should screen the candidate and not give the job blindly.

If you have multiple candidates, you don’t have to interview them all; you can screen them by reviewing their CVs and checking out their LinkedIn profiles, and eliminating the ones that don’t seem suited for the job.

Once you have a small group of candidates that are more or less equally qualified for the job, you should interview them. Some general questions you should ask during the interview are:

• Tell me about yourself/your background, or describe yourself in a few words.

• Why are you interested in this position?

• What is your greatest strength or weakness?

• Tell me about a time when you solved a problem/showed leadership qualities.

• What motivates you?

Hire Your First Employees

Once you know who you want to hire, you should send them a letter or email notifying them, including the position, the duties and benefits, and compensation. To ensure your new employees start out smoothly, make a detailed plan of what you want them to do and write down the specific tasks they need to complete throughout the day.

Final Thoughts

Hiring the first employees is a significant challenge for all new business owners, but it can be a simple and productive process if you know what to do. First, ensure you can afford to hire new employees and complete all the obligations before posting the job. Once there are candidates, all you need to do is screen them and interview the best ones for the job.

If you liked this ultimate guide to hiring your first employees you might also like the weekly Female Startup Club Newsletter, which features the incredibly inspiring stories of 400+ female founders we have interviewed to date.