How to Hire Your First Employee: A Founder's Checklist

You've been doing everything yourself for months — sales, delivery, invoicing, the lot — and you've finally hit the wall. You need a person. Not a favour from a friend, not a freelancer for one project. An actual employee, with a desk (or a login) and a reason to still be there in six months.

The strange thing about hiring your first employee is that all the usual hiring advice assumes you already have a company that hires people. You don't, yet. You have a business that's about to become an employer, and that's a different job than the one you've been doing.

Here's the order to do it in.

1. Write down what the job actually is — before you write the ad

Not a job title. A sentence that finishes: "This person exists so that I stop having to _____." If you can't finish that sentence, you're not ready to hire — you're ready to be busier for a while longer while you figure out what the gap actually is.

Once you have the sentence, list the five or six things they'll do in a normal week. Be honest if it's a mix — "half admin, half customer calls" is a real job description, and it's better to say that up front than to advertise for one thing and hand them another.

2. Budget for more than the salary

The number you have in your head is rarely the number it costs. On top of salary, work out:

• Statutory contributions — pension/provident fund, social security, insurance. These vary a lot by country and change occasionally, so check your local authority's current rates directly rather than trusting a number you half-remember.
• Equipment and software seats — a laptop, email account, any tools they'll need from day one.
• Your own time — the first month of any hire costs you hours in training and correcting mistakes, even a good hire. Budget for being slower before you're faster.

If the honest total doesn't work, that's useful information now, not three months in.

3. Decide what kind of hire this actually is

"Employee" and "contractor" aren't interchangeable labels you pick based on paperwork preference — they carry different legal obligations depending on your country, and misclassifying someone can cost you later even if both sides were happy with the arrangement at the time. If you're not sure which one this role is, that's worth ten minutes with a local accountant or employment lawyer before you post anything. It's cheaper to ask now than to fix later.

4. Write a real offer letter, even for a tiny company

It doesn't need a lawyer, but it needs to exist and be signed. At minimum:

• Job title and the one-sentence purpose from step 1
• Salary and how often it's paid
• Working hours and where the work happens
• Probation length and what happens at the end of it
• Notice period, both directions
• Start date

A lot of first-time employers skip this because it feels overly formal for a company of two people. It's not for them — it's for you, six months from now, when you and the new hire remember the conversation differently.

5. Advertise it, even if you already have someone in mind

If your cousin's friend seems perfect, it's tempting to skip the whole process. Do it anyway — post the role somewhere real, even for two weeks. Two reasons: you might find someone genuinely better, and if it doesn't work out with the person you already know, you'll want a paper trail showing you ran a fair process, not a favour.

6. Interview for evidence, not vibes

With no HR team and no experience interviewing, it's easy to hire the person you liked talking to. Liking someone tells you almost nothing about whether they can do the job. Ask for specifics instead:

• "Tell me about a time you had to figure something out with no one to ask." (You won't have anyone to ask either, most days.)
• "What's something you did in your last role that you're proud of, and what would you have done differently?"
• "Walk me through how you'd handle [an actual task from the job, not a hypothetical]."

If you can, give them a small paid task close to the real job — an hour of the actual work, not a puzzle. Watching someone do the thing tells you more than an hour of conversation ever will. If you don't have a good sense of what "good" looks like on that task because you've never hired for this role before, a structured assessment can give you a comparison point you don't have yet — that's a reasonable use of a tool like AssessFit, especially since the free plan covers a handful of candidates a month, which is roughly what a first hire needs.

7. Check at least one reference, properly

Call, don't email. Ask what the person was actually responsible for, and one thing they'd improve. A reference who can't say anything specific is telling you something too.

8. Plan the first day before it arrives

Have their equipment ready. Have a login that works. Have a first task that doesn't require you to explain everything from scratch — something they can start on with the instructions you give them, so their first afternoon isn't spent waiting for you to be free. The single biggest first-hire mistake isn't a bad interview process. It's a great hire showing up to a desk with no laptop and no plan.

9. Decide, now, how you'll check in

Before you had an employee, you never needed a rhythm for feedback — it was just you. Decide today whether you'll check in weekly, what you'll ask, and how you'll flag if something isn't working. Waiting until there's a problem to invent a check-in process means the first conversation you have about performance is also the first conversation you've ever had about performance. That's a hard place to start from.

Hiring your first employee is less about finding the perfect person and more about becoming, in a fairly short space of time, someone who can manage one. The paperwork above is the easy part. The harder part — noticing when something's not working and saying so early — you'll only get good at with practice. Start the practice now, not after the first mistake.