Never Hired Employees Before? Use These Tips
If you've started and grown a company by doing all the work yourself, at some point you'll need to hire employees so that the business can grow even larger. Hiring workers can seem like an easy thing to do, but if you make the wrong mistakes, you may face business and legal problems that you'll need to resolve. Check out these three tips so you and your new employees can get off to a great start.
Choose Employment Type
Before you even meet with prospective workers, you've got to make a decision about whether you want to have employees or independent contractors working with you. In theory, employees will cost your business more because you will be responsible for worker's compensation insurance, unemployment, and other costs. However, you will have more control over employees' hours and scope of work; independent contractors are only paid for a specific task they perform and there is a limit to how much input you can have.
Ask Legal, Appropriate Interview Questions
The first place where many new employers can run into problems with employees is during initial interviews. Without experience, you might not be sure what to ask, but more importantly, you could inadvertently ask for information that is illegal. Questions regarding religion, marriage and age and similar aspects of a person's life should not be asked and could land you in a federal lawsuit. You might want to make a list of the questions you plan to ask during interviews and run them past an employment attorney to ensure that your inquiries are lawful.
Once you're sure that your questions are legal, you need to be sure that you're asking questions that will provide insight into what kind of worker someone will be. To do this, it's smart to think of the work they'll be doing and ask technical questions about how they might solve certain problems you've experienced in the past. It's also important to get an idea of their overall work philosophy and whether they have a genuine interest in the work you do and the industry they work in.
Create a Policy Manual
It is also wise to write up a manual for your workers that details information about time off, sick days and disciplinary actions. That way, they know what to expect and you won't have to explain the same things to each new person who is hired. The manual may also provide protection if a worker disputes an action you take.
Hiring employees can be a sure sign that your business is moving in the right direction. To avoid trouble, retain an employment attorney like Law Offices Of Timothy O'Brien.