You’re finally ready to hire your first employee, what next?
Clearly Outline the Job Details: While setting up your business, you likely would have pictured the various roles that are required to run your business operations effectively. These roles are relevant to efficiently running your business and will always need to be filled. Make sure you outline these roles, the respective job descriptions, and details.
Ask for Referrals: Once you’ve outlined your job roles, utilize your network to ask for references that fit the job role you need. Your friend might know a management professional, who needs to switch careers to something more exciting or less stressful, depending on where your business is. Referrals also allow you access to a pool of pre-screened and pre-qualified candidates that match your job description.
Advertise Job Openings on the Right Channels; In order to attract the right candidates, it is important that you advertise your job openings on the right medium so you can reach your target candidate. You don’t want to advertise the post for an office cleaner on an online job site, or advertise for a professional accountant on the roadside. Matching your job openings to the right channel would help you attract the right candidate. Also, professional social media networks such as LinkedIn, could easily serve as means to access the right pool of candidates that fit your job description.
Identify Candidates that Match your Job Description: Once you have gone through the submitted applications, you can profile prequalified candidates that fit the job description. These days, employers can get a view of a candidate’s character through the candidate’s social media activity. Take this with a pinch of salt though, some candidates have been known to have alternate lives, one on social media, another in real life.
Invite Prequalified Candidates for an Interview: Once you have shortlisted your candidates, interview them. An effective interviewing tip is giving the candidates real life tasks related to the job description that would highlight their understanding of the role. Allow the candidates to ask questions as that would help you in assessing their potential and reasoning.
Screen Applications: At this stage, you would most likely receive tons of applications that apply for the advertised post. Sifting through all these applications could be menial, so you can use an application tracking software to filter out applications that do not meet prerequisite standards. Job listing sites like Jobberman & PushCV, have such job related features that make filtering applications seamless.
Get an Employment Contract: Send successful candidates offer letters which state their job role, responsibilities, compensation, start date etc. The offer letter, sometimes is the employment contract but some people opt for giving an employment contract in addition to the offer letter. The employment contract formalises the hiring process of your employee and states necessary legalities. The employment contract would also state role, responsibilities, company ethics, notice period for dismissal and resignation, confidentiality and IP clauses; and also outline the employee’s obligation to the employer.
Other important things to watch out for include if the employee would fit your company culture, your employees’ network & references, and if the employee can function in multiple roles especially as you are a start-up trying to stretch your Naira. Now that you know what to do to start hiring, you can watch this video to find out about Statutory obligations and contributions of an employer.
