Mervi Leminen
It is a fact that you only have 24 hours a day – every day! For work and leasure time activities you can use about 16 hours a day. The rest of time you need to use for sleeping and resting. Some entrepreneurs claim they work 24/7, unfortunately this is both impossible and unhealthy, but it’s also bad for your business.
Recognise the needs
It is very important for a single entrepreneur to recognise the moment when your work load has grown too big for one person to handle – and you need to find help. You can solve this problem by hiring, outsourcing or staffing.
It is a huge step for entrepreneur to become an employer. Suddenly you have a new role as a leader and you have to trust the other person and also delegate your tasks.
You have to make many compromises hiring your first employee, because you can´t find second you. You might be lucky – It might happen that you gain some value added to your business via new skilled worker. You also have to be willing to learn new leadership skills. You can either learn step by step, usually from mistakes, or be proactive in learning.
Hunting the right person
It is a good question to ask yourself, where to find best guy for the job. You can always use your own personal network and find a person you already know to work for you. But sometimes you have to depend on other channels. In many cases, it´s timesaving to use headhunters. Public and private recruiting organisations can also reach wide range of skilled jobseekers. Nowadays it is more and more common to use social media in supporting the recruitment process. The most important thing is to define the skills and competencies needed for the job beforehand.
Remembering the employer image
It´s good to remember, that whatever you do in your company you are always creating company image. And the company image is even more important while recruiting, you need to be competitive employer in the eyes of the jobseeker. Make sure that in every step of the way you are building positive company image – weather in customer service or in a job interview. And remember that “you are constantly in a spotlight”.
Job familiarisation
It is good to notice that new employee needs time to learn and adjust to a new job. The better plan you have for familiarisation the easier it is for a new person to fit in to your company culture and fulfill the expectations. Beforehand you can write down practices, tasks, processes, guidelines etc. By doing this you will be able to transfer the important information for the newcomer when the right time comes. The whole process of recruitment takes time and the earlier you start preparing for it, the more effective results you will get.
