WHY and WHEN should you hire new employees? – Part 1

On a general note, if you are a normal human being, you only have two hands, two eyes, and a few productive hours at your disposal to work. No matter how effective or efficient you can get, you will always need others to help you – even more so during your business growth. That is simply a fact. Besides, good results can come from one mind, but to produce great results, you always need opinions from a team. This cannot be more true for startups.

The questions now remain: 

1. Why should I hire new employees?
2. When should I hire new employees?

In this article, I will try and answer the above questions from various scenarios, angles, and perspectives. In the end, I hope this article helps you in your decision-making process.

What do employees really do?

The above question can also be: What should employees do in my business? Before choosing to hire new employees, you want to know what value they are going to bring to your project or company. It’s only logical that various types of companies require employees to perform various types of tasks! Since there are thousands of variations, I cannot really cover all of them in this article. I will only focus on the most common aspects.

In simple terms, employees are the backbone of your company. There is a bunch of tasks that need to be completed, and until we reach the Singularly of AI to cover all the tasks without human interaction, you will have to rely solely on your employees. I’m going to assume that already knew the above. But what you may not know, or at least underlook, is that the success of your business depends heavily on the productivity and welfare on your team. Here is why ?

1. Why you should hire new employees for your business?

In the first scenario, let’s assume that your business is in its very early stage, that you may even still be working alone. You may be tempted to think that you can manage it all alone! You couldn’t be more wrong. You cannot be good at everything. It’s just not humanly possible. For any business to stay operational, the main departments need to be well managed by a person with enough experience and enough time. These departments include:

• Human Resource Management – which can be a part-time activity.
• Production / Product Development – which must be a full-time activity.
• Market Research – also a full-time activity in most industries.
• Inventory and Purchasing – can be part-time.
• Marketing and Sales – definitely full-time, especially in this digital era.
• Accounting and Finance – more effective as full-time.
• Documents and Reports – can be part-time.
• Etc.

Even though your business may not need all the above at the beginning, whether you are an enterprise or an individual freelancer, you cannot scale without tackling each of them to a certain extend.

For the second scenario, let’s assume you have already scaled up your team to 4 people, including one co-founder and yourself. Statistically, one week contains 168 hours. According to The BalanceCareers, “Official employer designations regarding full-time employment generally range from 35 to 45 hours, with 40 hours being by far the most common standard. Some companies and countries consider 50 hours a week full-time for exempt employees.” Regardless of the industry you are in, this implies that each of your employees does not have enough time to make your company competitive enough. And if you consider extra-hours, unless your team is willing to work extra hours for no extra payments, you would be required to pay them more than they produce.

2. When should you hire new employees?

Above all: DO NOT HIRE ANY EMPLOYEE IF YOU DO NOT NEED THEM, AND IF YOU ARE NOT READY TO TAKE CARE OF THEM. In other words, do not hire new employees if you don’t have enough office space whey they can sit or enough money to pay them. But I believe you already knew the other. What you may not know, or you undertook, are:

1. You must genuinely need more labor to operate.
2. You must be ready and able to pay taxes for them since, in most countries, you must help them pay their Employee Tax Credit.
3. Of course, they have to have the ability to bring actual value to the advancement of your company.
4. And as a bonus, they must share your beliefs and company culture.

Knowing whether to hire more people is still a dilemma for us too. At the very beginning, our team had only two people. They managed to set up a welcoming ground for the rest of the team. Work was a lot. It needed more hands. But, having a very tight budget, they could not hire more people then. They waited. Four months later, after having raised a bit of capital, they managed to hire 2 more people.

This is a very broad topic. We know there are more reasons beyond what we mentioned above. If you have more ideas to share with us, leave them in the comment section below.