November 30, 2023
If your business is doing well, you’ll eventually find yourself needing additional help. Hiring your first employee seems like the natural next step, but it’s a monumental step for a small business owner who hasn’t employed anyone before.
There are lots of factors to consider before hiring your first employee, but we’ll focus on the three most important considerations to take before you begin to hire staff, including the true cost, how much you’ll be able to reduce expenses, and where you advertise the position to potential applicants.
Throughout the hiring process, keep these considerations in mind and only hire an applicant that you’re truly excited about.
3 Things to Consider Before Hiring Your First Employee
1. The real cost of hiring a full-time employee
There’s a reason many business owners start by outsourcing work to a third party or hiring part-time. Hiring your first full-time employee will cost much more than their salary alone. Federally-required benefits, taxes and regulations that all employers are subject to, time spent hiring, training, and managing the employee, additional office space, new equipment for the employee, and more will bring the real cost of hiring a full-time employee to potentially tens of thousands more than the cost of salary alone. This is a serious consideration to make before hiring your first employee – it’s one of the biggest costs you’ll take on as a business owner.
2. The places you advertise determine the quality of applicants
While public job sites can certainly link you up with excellent applicants, the nature of these sites means that you’ll get lots of applicants – those qualified and worth your time in the search, and those who are not. Some will apply without reading the position description or requirements, and there’s really no way to stop that. To cut down on time spent wading through applicants that aren’t a good fit, though, just narrow the places you advertise online and in print.
You want to cultivate a small, promising crop of applicants that are likely to fit the bill, so starting by mentioning the opening on social media (Facebook and LinkedIn especially) could be a good place to start. You might find that friends and family can refer qualified people for the position and shorten your search considerably.
3. Hiring smart can reduce your expenses
If you look for specific abilities, skills, and experience when hiring your first employee, you can actually reduce your expenses and overhead. Your new employee may be able to handle not only bookkeeping and accounting, but also editing and writing blog posts on a weekly basis. Maybe they know how to use a program that you were previously paying to take a tutorial in.
There are many ways a new employee can help reduce your expenses, so be sure to hire smart and look for the skills and experience you need to bring your overhead down. Create a tally of the estimated savings you could expect by delegating costly tasks to your new employee to find how much your expenses could be reduced.
