Hiring the right employees is exceedingly hard regardless of your age, however for the young entrepreneur, recruiting can get extra tricky. To fully examine its complex nature, we must first look at the reasons to hire employees and not to hire employees; this should help determine whether you should be hiring or should be working more.
When to Hire
As a young entrepreneur, youth is a big advantage when it comes to having a great deal of energy. However, youth is a disadvantage as many start-ups run by young entrepreneurs don’t have much capital behind them and struggle to pay the bills as is.
Since hiring not only involves paying payroll (include taxes, health insurance, additional benefits, lawyer fees for non-compete, unemployment insurance, etc.), I would strongly suggest only hiring when you absolutely need to. If you can learn something on your own, take the time and do so as nobody is going to care about your business as much as you do.
Though, if you’re blue in the face and weak in the knees, let’s move on:
How To Hire
There are many ways to find employees and I would not recommend a simple Craigslist posting. Prior to doing anything, consider the following:
1. What you would like the person to be doing on a daily basis?
2. What you can afford to pay the individual? The more trained, the more expensive is the typical rule.
3. What is your corporate culture or your ideal corporate culture that you wish to set up?
4. What type of background and years of experience are you seeking? One tip I could give is not to hire someone older than you as you don’t want to hire a mentor, you want an employee. While you can’t be age discriminate by law, if you find someone that is older who can do the job, great…just make sure that the boundary lines are set from day 1.
Writing a Job Description
Now, it’s time to write the highly important job description. You should be able to take the above information and put it in a neat few paragraphs which should not only serve for advertising purposes, but it should also serve for a “pitch” a.k.a. what you are going to say when you initially interview the individual.
Also, I would recommend including certain things such as the benefits of working at your company in the job description as recruiting in a smaller company can be quite difficult as potential employees can see you as a failure risk.
Prior to asking the interview questions, I always find it best to discuss my client (the recruiting party) in a manner that is interesting and that reflects their positive aspects prior to me asking for information. The conversation tends to flow better.
Interview Process
The interview process should be at least 2 if not 3 interviews. Don’t hire just to hire. I have had a lot of bad luck doing that and have seen my clients have trouble as well. Do your due diligence and ask the questions that need to be asked.
If they don’t want to answer, then go to the next applicant. Make sure you have plenty of options as the more options we have, the better choice(s) we’re going to make.
In the End
Recruiting is very tricky, but it can be a lot easier on the young entrepreneur if he / she takes the methodical steps to make it more simplistic. While I could write volumes on the topic, the above should give you a good head-start. Happy Recruiting!
Ken Sundheim is the CEO of KAS Placement www.kasplacement.com an executive search firm specializing in sales and marketing recruitment for organizations from over 30 countries. Sundheim founded the company at age 25.
