Building a Team: Essential Tips for Your First Startup Hire

For business owners, hiring your first employee can be a daunting task. Not only do you have to consider salary and wages, but also practical training, talent management and creating a work environment that motivates and enhances productivity.

But this investment is crucial not just for your business but for the economy as a whole, especially with the official unemployment rate rising to 33.5% from 32.9% in the first quarter of this year.

Make the right choice

When hiring employees, it’s always tempting to choose friends and family. However, this comes with its own challenges, especially when performance doesn’t meet expectations.

As with any aspect of business, it’s important to do your homework. Write a detailed job description before you start your search. You’ll find plenty of useful examples on the internet.

When it comes time to advertise your job, you have a few options beyond using a recruitment agency, especially if you don’t need specialized knowledge.

For example, you can search for potential employees on SAYouth, a free, tax-free online platform that connects jobseekers with income and training opportunities.

Powered by the Harmbee Youth Employment Accelerator, the platform is a simple and efficient way to recruit candidates for entry-level positions while contributing to youth employment.

Once you have a list of candidates to choose from, you need to shortlist the ones who seem suitable based on their resumes. The next step is to interview them.

If you are not using a recruitment agency that can conduct initial interviews, we recommend that you do it over the phone or video chat at first rather than in person, and then find a way to test their skills to see if they are a good fit for the right position.

Finding the right support isn’t that hard

As a startup, you don’t want to hire someone who can’t do the job. However, experience isn’t always a must. Depending on your requirements, it may be wise to hire someone with the right attitude and willingness to learn. And there are literally millions of young job seekers who could fit that criteria.

This means that experiential learning, apprenticeships, or other forms of work experience can go a long way to helping a candidate land a job. For this reason, it’s important to test candidates first before hiring someone.

Tough contracts

Even if you’re hiring an employee for the first time and are confident you’ve made the right choice, having a subordinate can make you feel uneasy.

Before accepting someone into your small business, always make sure you have the right documentation.

If the right terms such as notice periods, sick leave, maternity leave and severance clauses are not set out in the contract, it could end up costing you money if the hire doesn’t work out.

Help SA bounce back by creating jobs

It’s a very exciting time for startups ready to grow, even if you’re just one person. Scaling your business means more revenue that you can reinvest or turn into profit. But be careful about bringing someone on board before doing your due diligence.

Sure, it’s not always easy to find the right help, and you’ll probably have to pay tuition fees for the first few years. But you’ll eventually get the hang of it, and building a team will get easier by accomplishing one job at a time.