The four key steps to making your first hire

Expanding a business and hiring new people has one core requirement: you have to make a critical business decision.

I don’t find myself making hiring decisions every day, although there are times when you either need to make a decision because the business needs it or you are forced to make a decision.

Recently, we have been hiring new members to build our newest site Mobile Phone Finder, and I have been facing these critical business situations more often.

My hit rate of good and bad decisions has improved ever since I put a process around the decisions.

Here are the key steps I’ve learned when it comes to hiring someone.

How to know when you need someone

These are the prerequisites of beginning this thought process. If you haven’t got all of them, don’t focus your efforts on hiring someone – focus on sorting out the business.

You have established your own processes of your core business. A process here is the step by step guide on how to do the thing you want them to do in the business.

This is super e–myth101, but it’s impossible to tell someone what to do without knowing the process. Some roles are more creative and there isn’t a process established, but I would suggest defining that as well into a broad process with a creative component.

The structure produces more defined and better outcomes. The best way to ensure this is the case is if you personally have done the process and you can write it down step by step. You essentially want to hire people to do parts of the process:

• It’s a profitable process. If your process isn’t profitable, don’t scale it. Fix the process first.

• You could potentially make more money by doing your core process faster and more often.
• When you make a profit, don’t be smart and come up with another way to also make a profit, instead, just do the process you figured out before more often.

How to make the decision

Fundamentally my decision here is based on:

• Can you make more money by speeding up your core business process?

• Is there a simple part to that process that someone else could do?

As you can see, all I do is break down the decision into smaller choices that are easy to make.

I believe a complex decision is actually a set of simple decisions lumped together and your brain is trying to solve them all at once.

Now that you have your prerequisites, you need to define who you want.