By Evan Vitale
If your business is growing and you’re having a difficulty keeping up with everything, now might be the time to hire an employee.
Hiring a good employee is not only important to your business, but it’s also a big part of any business. Growth can’t be sustained by yourself. Eventually, you’ll need to add people to your staff.
However, the biggest challenge in hiring an employee is to find the right person in order to keep things moving in the right direction from the start.
Before you begin seeking job applicants, write a well-defined job description and detail the person’s responsibilities. Will the new employee be full-time or part-time? What are their working hours? What is the hourly rate or salary? Are there any benefits?
As the resumes arrive, begin selecting the top candidates for the job opening. Call them for brief telephone interviews and decide if you’d like for them to come to the office for a face-to-face interview.
Based on the interviews; references and the individuals’ credentials, picking the right candidate should be easy. Always make sure the person you hire can be properly trained and that they can work with little or no supervision. That means you, as the owner, shouldn’t micro-manage the new employee. After all, you hired them to do a specific job in your company and ease the burden as your business grows. Don’t look over their shoulder. Let them do the job you hired them to do.
When a client of mine started his company, he was told that good employees are those who are nice. Hire nice people. During one interview, the business owner’s chair slipped and rolled out from under him as he began to sit down for the interview. He landed hard on the floor and was in a great deal of pain. The potential employee sat motionless in his chair, didn’t get up to help his future boss, nor did he ask if he was OK. Needless-to-say, the interview was short and the candidate wasn’t offered the job.
Good employees should care about the business, the clients, the owner(s) and other employees.
Another client told me that since his business was small (a staff of three people), that everyone interviewed potential employee candidates. Hiring was a team decision as they all wanted to make sure the new member would be a great addition to the current team.
Finally, hiring friends or family members isn’t usually a good idea. Sometimes, friends and relatives can try to take advantage of arriving to work late, longer lunches, leaving early, etc. It makes it difficult on you to be a good boss and sometimes hard to personnel issues and problems when it comes to friends and family members.
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