How to Successfully Hire a Team for Your Online Business
Hiring anyone to be a part of your team is always difficult. It’s hard to know who can be a good fit for your business, to find someone with the same values and work ethics as you strive to have. However, maybe you want to develop your business in the coming months, and growing your team seems inevitable. In this day and age, there are so many different ways of hiring people, and so many different work trends to choose from. Let’s talk about hiring a team for an online business, and debunk the choices.
The benefits of a remote team
In recent years, and especially due to the current circumstances, many people have transitioned to a remote position. A report from the remote-working platform Upwork stated that in 2021, 1 in 4 Americans would be working remotely. The report also stated that by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working from home.
The reason why is that hiring employees remotely has many benefits. With a remote team, you will be able to:
Save on the cost of office space, on average up to $2000 per year and per employee
Expand the number of applicants available to your business by going further than your location, and prioritizing skills over locale
See a great increase in productivity. A recent Stanford studied showed that individuals working from home were far more productive than those confined inside an office space
Work with your team in less time and in a more effective way.
The benefits of an in-person team
If you too have been working remotely during the pandemic, you’ll know that working from home isn’t always easy. It can lead to having many distractions during a workday: a screaming baby, a noisy pet, a busy family, meal making, cleaning duties… You might be worried all this could intervene with the efficiency you are expecting from your future employees.
As well as being a source of frustration for an employer, being a part of a remote team can be very isolating for employees. Because happy employees make for efficient ones, you’ll probably have to reinvest the money you saved with a remote team into:
Strong, branded, in-house communication tools
In-person work retreats that allow your employees to bond with colleagues and create a sense of community
Paying for co-working spaces for each of your employees in case their home isn’t an adequate workplace for them.
If you add all of these extra costs up, you might find it would simply be easier to recruit a team to work inside an office. An in-person team can also be a real asset to your business, for different reasons. You will be able to monitor performance and communicate in real-time with your employees if you’re in the same physical space as them. You will also be able to build a real relationship of trust and respect, which in turn will be returned back to you in the form of loyalty and commitment to the growth of your business.
Who should you hire first?
You should hire your first employee when you no longer have enough hours in a day to get everything done. There is a huge amount of growth potential sitting in your businesses’ hands. It is hard to have the confidence to hire your first employee as a small business owner, especially if it’s an online one. However, there’s a point where you simply have to delegate if you wish to continue growing your business.
The first employee you should hire is a generalist, someone who can get a whole array of tasks done. That is usually what online business owners need first when they are looking to recruit their first team member. Design a staffing plan to help you decide who your first employee should be compared to the grand scheme of things. Plan out how you want your team to grow - do you need a personal assistant to start with? Someone in charge of sales? A social media person? How can you combine as many of your needs as you can into one employee that will help you with your most important and time-consuming tasks?
Tip: Try hiring a freelancer to do the job before you get a full-time employee on board. That way, you’ll be able to see the immediate results without taking any significant financial risks.
How to hire the right person for your team
Now that you’ve determined whether or not you prefer a remote or in-person team, you should prepare your recruitment process for success. The most important thing to consider when trying to hiring the right person for your team is to communicate the key points of what you are expecting from your future employee. Be clear about the do’s and dont’s, and express what skills and qualities are important to you: patience? Organization? Team-spirit? Creativity? Here are a few extra tips to remember when considering how to hire the perfect person for your team’s needs:
Clearly outline your company’s values before you find out if your candidates are aligned
Detail the job description as much as you can
Structure the interview as best as you can
Look beyond CV’s
Don’t forget about asking for references
Publish your offer on different platforms
Hiring a team as an online business: an exciting step
Hiring a team as an online business owner is completely different than hiring one for a brick-and-mortar business. You won’t need anyone to greet customers or take care of an office. However, you’ll need to invest more time, financial resources, and workforce into curating your social media and online presence. This should reflect in how you choose to recruit your first employee for your online business. Remember, this is an exciting step: you are designing your brand and crafting your values as a business into a story, then having the opportunity to tell that story to someone who wants to be a part of your team. How great to be able to enlist someone’s help in helping you grow the business you have worked so hard to create!
