Guest Post: How do you figure out who to hire?

Emira here, one of the co-authors of , and guest poster at this here lovely blog while Felicia continues her world domination tour. This post is Part 2 of a four stop blog book tour we’re rolling out this week in support of the book release. For Part 1 on knowing when it’s time to hire an employee for your small business, you can visit Michelle Goodman’s Anti 9-to-5 Guide website here.

Today I’m going to talk about who to hire and I don’t mean how do you pick from that stack of awesomely qualified resumes you’ve got piled up on your desk, I’m talking about a few steps earlier in the hiring process when you sit down to figure out what kind of job description you’re looking to have filled in the first place. For some of you this may be a really simple question to answer. Say you’ve got a retail location and since you opened up last year you’ve been spending 7 days a week behind the cash register, while also doing the books, reordering, stocking shelves etc and your feet are beyond tired. If that’s you, then knowing that you need someone with retail experience to take a few shifts a week off your hands is a pretty easy answer. For others, the answer may not seem so clear.

Before you figure out what kind of position you’re hiring for you need to sit down and think about where your strengths lie. You may absolutely love the face to face contact of working in your store and be perfectly happy to be the main shop girl, while hiring someone else to take care of your bookkeeping for example. Or, if you design and make a product, you may be perfectly happy staying involved in the production end of things, and instead you can hire someone to help you pack and ship orders. Basically, what you need to do here is make two lists: one the lists out all the pieces of your business that you really love doing, and that you’re really good (and efficient) at, and then a second list of things you’ve grown tired of, were never that good at or know someone else can do better than you. The trick here for some of you will be letting go of wanting to be good at/involved in absolutely everything — afterall your business is your passion, so it’s tempting to stay wrapped up in the details, but trust a girl who has been there: that’s a quick recipe for burn out.

Once you’ve pulled together your list of skills and tasks you’re willing to pass off, you’ve got the beginnings of a job description (or maybe more than one). Take a look at how many hours you think you spend doing each of the tasks you’ve outlined and figure out what kind of a position you’re offering. Is it full time? Part time? Would it be better served by hiring someone on contract? Don’t be afraid to throw a few seemingly unrelated tasks together to make up one job description, it’s typical in a small company for employees to wear a few different hats after all. So things like “aiding with production of silk screened garments” and “packing orders for shipping” are probably fair game to fit into one position. Just make sure you’re not asking for a set of qualities so diverse you’re unlikely to find it all in one person — so “answering phones, walking my dog, and handling Public Relations” probably don’t all belong together.

Figuring out whether or not you want to hire someone on contract — or simply contract out a chunk of work like bookkeeping or manufacturing — or whether you want to hire someone is a whole other piece to consider. When we hired our first employee we weren’t totally certain whether we really had a full or part time position available, and to be honest we were really nervous about the idea of being responsible for someone else’s paycheck. So we started out with what I now think of as employer training wheels and hired someone on a part-time six month contract, just to play it safe. By the end of I’d say 3 weeks, we knew we’d want to keep that person on permanently, but it was a great way for us to ease into the extra expense and the mental shift that being bosses of someone other than our selves required. We devote a lot of space to figuring out whether staff or contractors are right for you in our book, so if those questions are coming up a lot for you, do check it out.

Tomorrow Lauren will be talking about staying true to yourself as you make the jump into being the boss of someone else over at All Things Girl. So do stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under daily murmurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.