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Hiring Employees for your business can be a herculean task. As a company moves from the drawing board onto the real world, nothing better signifies a sense of being an actual business than making the first hire.
While it is aptly considered a critical milestone, most entrepreneurs still make the mistake of just winging it, without due consideration to proper systems and documentation. This often gives rise to conflicts and friction at a crucial stage in the life of a company.
Such an informal approach might work for unorganized, mom-and-pop establishments. But to build an actual business, hiring essentially involves building an HR department from the ground up.
As a result, most entrepreneurs find themselves confused and rudderless at this stage, with the copious amounts of often contradicting information overload making this worse.
Checklists For Hiring Employees
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach in this regard, here is an essential checklist, which should set the stage for your business, before hiring employees or even making the first hire.
- Legal & Regulatory Compliance
The first thing to do while hiring employees for your business is to ensure you remain on the right side of the law by checking up on legal and regulatory compliance requirements.
Each jurisdiction has its own set of labor laws, either requiring an employer identification number (EIN), minimum set wages, pay disclosure requirements, immigration rules, and more.
These regulations often depend on the size and scale of your recruitment, and often don’t extend to small businesses with less than 10 employees.
Either way, knowing and understanding the law remains absolutely pertinent before taking the next step. As these laws essentially guide the systems, processes, pay, perks, and other benefits that you implement.
- Establish Scope & Requirements
There is obviously a reason why you want to hire someone, and unlike an informal business establishment, a company cannot hire employees to do anything and everything, at least not without being met with high levels of friction and attrition.
As a result, it is important to establish the role, its scope, what the job entails, along with the pay, perks, and other incentives to go along with it.
Employees can thrive if they know what they are responsible for, and what is expected of them, and that should be the first thing that a business owner comes up with before moving ahead with the job posting.
- Get Clear About How Payroll Works e.g. Issuing Pay Stubs
A professional work environment requires well-thought-out systems and processes, and when it comes to making your first hire, this essentially begins with payroll.
Errors, confusions, or delays in payroll practices stand to undermine the systems, chain of command, and the overall perception among employees in the workplace.
There are a number of tools, templates, frameworks, and best practices in this regard, and the only thing employers have to do is pick one that best suits their requirements, and stick with it.
For example, when it comes to issuing pay stubs, there are numerous online pay stub generators that can come to your aid, along with different features, templates, and integrations.
You can also use an online time clock to ensure accurate monitoring and recording of employee attendance for payroll purposes.
- Onboarding Systems
Before an employee arrives at work on the first day, make sure to have an onboarding and training plan ready to give them a thorough understanding of their work, systems, processes, and more.
This helps them get started right away, without any downtime, mistakes, or friction.
All jobs have a learning curve, but this can be minimized to a great extent with the help of a robust training program.
Here again, there are a number of tools particularly aimed at onboarding and learning management for employees, which can further help improve a company’s perceptions in the mind of an employee.
Final Words
Hiring employees is no doubt a significant milestone, and as such should be treated like one. Whether it’s your first hire or your 1,000th, there is no place for being perfunctory, but bear in mind that this doesn’t mean that you should aim for perfection.
There will be mistakes, which will be rectified as you hire more and more people, but the guiding light must be in pursuit of a high-caliber workplace.
