Are you ready to hire your first employee?

You’ve probably been working 18-hour days, six or seven days a week, on your business. And there is still more to do than you can possibly get done.

So you decide it’s time to hire someone.

It’s the right instinct — but the moment before you act on it is worth protecting. Your first hire will be roughly 50% of your business. Getting it wrong is expensive in a way that later hires never quite are.

Three questions, before you write a single line of a job ad.

What are they going to do?

Most first job descriptions are written from a feeling — I’m drowning — rather than from evidence. The result reads something like “picking up tasks from the business owner,” which tells a good candidate nothing and attracts nobody you’d want.

Do this instead. For one week, write down everything you do. Every task, as you do it. Don’t tidy it up.

At the end of the week, go through the list and mark each item as one of two things:

• Something you will keep doing
• Something the new person will take on

Then look at what’s left over — the things that never got done at all, because there wasn’t time. Those belong on the list too, and they’re often the most revealing part of it.

That marked-up list is your job description. It’s specific, it’s real, and it’s grounded in a week of actual evidence rather than a Tuesday-night feeling.

A vague job description doesn’t just attract the wrong people. It quietly tells you that you haven’t decided what you want yet.

Can you afford to hire your first employee?

The salary is not the cost. It’s a fraction of it.

The real number also includes:

• Employer’s National Insurance — a straight percentage on top
• Setting up PAYE and running payroll
• Employer’s Liability Insurance, which is a legal requirement
• A workspace — desk, laptop, software licences, phone
• Your time training them, which is the one everyone forgets and the one that costs the most in the early weeks

A rough but useful test: take the salary you have in mind and double it. If the business can still carry that number, you can afford to hire. If doubling it makes you wince, you have your answer — and it’s better to have it now than four months in.

What kind of candidate do you want for the job?

“I’ll know it when I see it” is the most expensive sentence in hiring. It leads to exactly one of two outcomes: you hire the first person you warm to, or you interview forever and never commit.

Before you meet anyone, write down three to five characteristics the person genuinely needs. Not a wish list of twenty. Three to five.

Then — and this is the part people skip — decide how you’ll actually assess each one. What would you ask? What would a good answer sound like? What would you want to see them do?

If you can’t describe how you’d measure it, it isn’t a real criterion. It’s a preference, and preferences are how bias gets in.

Before you go

Remember what’s actually at stake here. This person will be half your business. They’ll be in the room for every decision, they’ll shape how the next hire is made, and they’ll be the first person who ever chose to believe in what you’re building.

That deserves a week of note-taking and an honest look at the numbers.