Hiring staff for your startup is a major step destined to have a lasting impact on your company’s growth and success. Make the right additions to your solo project and it can blossom into a thriving business. Hire the wrong people — or even just get the timing wrong — and you’ll watch your funds ebb away as you wonder how everything could have gone so poorly.
Due to this, it’s perfectly sensible to delay this move for quite some time while you build the foundation of your startup and determine definitively where you want it to go. Real growth demands expansion, though, so you’ll need to take the plunge eventually. But how can you know when it’s the right time? Is it possible to be certain about it?
Advice For Startups
In this post, we’re going to consider this thorny topic and offer some advice to help startup founders manage two key things: deciding when they should start hiring staff, and confirming (or establishing) their readiness to effectively onboard them. Let’s get started!
Focus on what you need to progress
Fantasy scenarios can be oh-so tempting when you’re growing a business: you can envision a big office, a huge team of talented go-getters, a profile in a national publication… But if you’re going to succeed, you need to differentiate between what you want and what you need. A high-end office chair will make you more comfortable, for instance, but it won’t significantly impact your productivity. It’s a want, not a need.
So when you’re considering hiring, ask yourself some key questions. Are there tasks crucial for your business’s growth that you can’t handle alone? Are you feeling overwhelmed, preventing you from concentrating on strategy? And if you do need to hire, do you need to go directly to full-time employees or can you get away with using freelancers or contractors?
If you find that your workload is manageable and you’re not missing out on business opportunities due to a lack of manpower, it may not be the right time to hire. On the other hand, if you’re struggling to keep up with day-to-day operations and critical tasks are falling through the cracks, it might be time to consider expanding your team — but keep your options when doing so to avoid taking an ill-fitting course of action.
Consider the legal ramifications
You don’t just shake someone’s hand and onboard them. There are many legal complications, so you need to familiarize yourself with labor regulations including minimum wage, overtime, benefits, and workplace safety requirements. Depending on your location, you may need to register as an employer. Do you know what your obligations are?
And that’s rough enough if you’re hiring locally. If you’re hiring nationally, there could be many regional disparities to take into account. Take your quest international (hardly unusual these days, of course) and you must contend with the need to accommodate unfamiliar legal systems: services like Remote can help with this by routing your hires through local legal entities, but it’s best to do your research regardless to ensure you’re not getting in over your head.
Prioritize financial management
Let’s say you take all the factors into account and conclude with certainty that your startup won’t grow until you’ve hired some employees. That clears everything up, doesn’t it? Your path is now obvious, you might think… Only life is rarely so simple. That assumes that company growth is your top priority, but it probably isn’t unless you have unlimited resources.
Your primary concern when making decisions needs to be money: not in the sense of pursuing profit over all else, but in the sense of ensuring that you don’t need to suddenly shut your business down because you’ve run out of liquidity. Hiring the right people might lead to fast expansion with impactful financial returns, but there are no guarantees. What if it doesn’t?
What if your new hires take a while to get into the flow? What if they’re net financial negatives for a year? You need to know whether you can cover the costs of hiring, and how long you can sustain payroll for. If you’re not assured that your finances can handle the medium-term costs of hiring, you might not be ready to grow your startup. Shore up your foundation first.
Think about your brand
Taking on employees doesn’t just impact your productivity: it also impacts how your startup is perceived. Each hire reflects your brand, sending a message about the state and future of your operation. Before you start hiring, then, you should think carefully about brand image. What sort of team do you want to build? Do you want to surround yourself with productivity beasts? Artistic savants? Thoughtful communicators?
It’s obviously a massive cliche to define company values, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. If you resolve to take your values seriously, they can help you chart the course of your company, and they can absolutely help you decide whom to hire. They can also help you attract people: a business with personality is more tempting to candidates. Take some time to imagine your ideal company makeup in terms of personalities and skills, then proceed.
Create a solid hiring plan
If all the signs lead you to believe you’re ready to hire, well, there’s at least one step left before you can proceed: you need a plan. At a minimum, this plan should detail the roles and responsibilities you need to cover, state the talent pool you’ll be using (be it local, national, international, or intergalactic), set out what you’re willing to pay and which benefits you’re ready to offer, and make it clear when you’ll start and when you want to finish.
This doesn’t mean that you need to handle the hiring process yourself, though. If you’d rather offload it to a recruitment agency, you can. But whether you advance it yourself or outsource it, having the plan there will encourage progress and reduce the likelihood of making a big mistake like hiring the wrong people or taking on salaries you can’t accommodate.
Don’t rush or drag your feet
When you eventually get to the point of being ready to hire, remember that you mustn’t rush it. Ideally, your hires will stay with your company for years to come, growing in knowledge and brand awareness, so bringing on the first applicants is a bad idea. You should be patient and conduct thorough interviews: ask smart questions to assess problem-solving abilities, and don’t waste people’s time by asking them where they see themselves in five years.
On the flip side, you also mustn’t extend the process unnecessarily. You’ll never find the perfect candidate, after all: if someone really suitable comes along, snap them up instead of holding out. You don’t want to keep someone on the hook for so long that they choose to go elsewhere, particularly since word could spread that you don’t respect people’s time.
Wrapping up, while hiring staff for the first time is an exciting step, you need to be extremely cautious before you get started. By ensuring that you’re truly ready before you begin building your team, you’ll make the process much easier and more comfortable. You’ll also make candidates more likely to be interested in joining your operation!
