Things to Remember When Hiring Your First Employee

Hiring your first employee may be a daunting task. How do you know you've chosen the proper person?

How can you then set them up for success once they begin? Fortunately, there are a few tried-and-true tactics you can utilize to guarantee a pleasant recruiting process for both the company and the employee.

1. Use an inclusive recruiting strategy to discover the best applicant

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of candidates when advertising a job opportunity and lean toward employing people you know. People prefer to be reminded of their past experiences, so seeing the name of your previous institution or employer on an application might be reassuring.

Resumes, on the other hand, are only records of privilege. There may be exceptional applicants who were unable to attend a reputable institution or participate in unpaid internships due to financial constraints.

When it comes to recruiting, inclusive hiring entails being aware of these advantages and using blind hiring, which involves eliminating employer and college names and dates from resumes.

You can guarantee that you're assessing applicants on their potential and ability, not simply their advantages, by adopting inclusive hiring.

2. Establish early expectations for both of you

There's nothing wrong with being up with a candidate about income, work schedules, and how frequently a "all hands on deck" situation will occur. Some individuals thrive in fast-paced situations, while others like to take things at a more leisurely pace.

Having an open and honest conversation during interviews can assist ensure that you are both the best match. After all, employing a new employee is akin to forming a new relationship, and you want to make sure it's a win-win situation.

3. Plan ahead of time for your onboarding

The first few weeks of any employment are frequently the most stressful and instructive. There are a lot of procedures and systems to understand, as well as a lot of information to absorb.

Setting up a thorough onboarding strategy before your new employee begins is critical to both the new employee and the employer's success. Documenting commonly visited websites, account login information, and often asked questions may be beneficial since your new employee can refer to it anytime they need to.

You probably don't have a solid onboarding template to refer to if you've never recruited an employee before. Fortunately, many firms make their onboarding playbooks available for download. You can make the finest elements work for you by combining them.

4. Make a personal connection with your new hire

It was overwhelming, frantic, and a whirlwind. That's how it feels to begin a new career, so picture how it would feel to recruit your first employee. Make time to contact base with your new employee, especially within their first week, to get to know them and connect on a personal level.

You don't have to be friends with your coworkers, but you should demonstrate that you appreciate them as individuals in addition to the job they perform for you. A brief 15-minute check-in where you inquire how their onboarding is going, as well as if they have any weekend plans or if they watched the game last night, may be really beneficial.

Thanks to Alice Corner at Business 2 Community whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.