How You Know When It’s Time to Hire

There was last week a blogpost in BusiessNewsDaily.com about when it’s time to hire, but I think it left out a few salient factors.
1. It seemed to be more oriented to startups hiring their first employee, but there are a lot of you established firms out there that are starting to think about hiring, so all of you should read this.
2. While the article did a good job of portraying why to hire, such as an absence of time to do many things, the article didn’t go the next lap about suggest that one list the work you don’t want to do, and assign a numerical importance to each of these tasks the new hire should do. For existing firms, the attributes of the job should be listed, and the importance of each task should be ranked, say on a 1 to 5 scale. We like to put attitude and attendance at the top of the list. Each job is different, though, so the tasks will be different, as will the rankings.
3. You might want to consider hiring through a temp agency or on a 1099 basis, to test people out, to see if they do what they appear to be able to do. It’s easy to fire people outside Arizona, where we’re based, but it’s more difficult in other states.
We just happen to have two courses on the hiring subject, one for startups (A14) and one for established businesses (E10).
Don’t make mistakes on hiring, either….it’s expensive.