3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Hiring Your First Employee

Hiring 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.