- Recruit for employee
- Consider what type of employee you need as your first
- Consider the level you desire
- Place ad in local paper and/or online
- Contact vendors, clients, and friends as you search
Recruit Employee (May Handle Multiple Roles)
|
|
Once you are at the point where you can't handle all of the daily work by yourself and you no longer wish to rely on sub-contractors and other independent resources such as temps to perform the work, you will likely look to your first employee. Since it is much more expensive to have someone on board full time, make sure that you no longer can work effectively with as-needed resources including temps.
Your first hire is tricky since you will likely need them to handle a wide variety of tasks. An additional challenge is that they may be working by themselves for long periods of time. You are looking for a special person - one who is flexible in terms of what they work on, can work alone, is competent in multiple areas, and is willing to work for someone without a track record. If they have been working for large employers in the past or they're very specialized in what they do, these could be problems for them.
An additional trick at this stage is choosing the appropriate header for the position when advertising it. Since the job will likely have multiple responsibilities, you need to find a good balance. For example, our first two hires included a graphic designer and a project manager.
Since we were producing Postcard Promotions heavily at the time, our focus was naturally on the graphic design and the project management. As it turned out, we didn't really need a full time graphic designer. While we had some work to keep her busy, her focus was 100% on graphic design. What our clients needed was basic/good design, not the top of the line high-end design. We were designing post cards, not extensive brochures.
After she left our company a year later, we decided to merge the position of project manager and design and we found a good match. While we actually hired this third person to handle marketing, he ended up self learning the graphic design and project management and he successfully handled two roles.
There were nice advantages to this arrangement and over time we realized that we could sub-contract when needed for high-end design, and kept the internal design simple. This combined position worked well for us and help us move away from having a specialist in each position.
You also need to decide what level you want to hire and what you can afford. People who have a great deal of experience can of course be helpful in growing your company, however, you will need to weigh the increased expense vs. the work produced.
You may find hiring people who want the experience and are willing to work for a slightly lower rate may make more sense for you. They are also less likely to be put off by the lack of a big company and the opportunities for in-depth training on one field. They may like the chance to work across multiple disciplines and get their feet wet in new areas.
While advertising in the paper is a great way to locate potential employees, don't overlook talking/emailing vendors, customers, and friends for ideas on people to interview. Spread the word about what type of person you are looking for. When we place ads in the local paper, we also pay a little more and get included in their online job database.
Post detailed information on your web site that outlines the work, the requirements, and perhaps a general salary range. Direct all potential candidates to this web site prior to scheduling an interview to avoid wasting anyone's time.
©2002 Track Marketing Group, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.