Okay so maybe I've given you a little bit of encouragement

to consider hiring your first employee.

If you do go down the route, the next question is,

"Well who should I hire?"

A lot of freelancers have this habit of sidestepping the issue

of hiring their first employee by working in partnership with other freelancers.

And it certainly is an option, but it does have some disadvantages

that you need to be aware of.

Firstly if you work with other freelancers, you're giving away

a big chunk of your profit margin

and none of us really want to do that.

But secondly you can find yourself turned into a glorified project manager

where you're dealing with the client and all of the associated problems

and someone else is doing the fun work that you prefer to be doing yourself.

Taking on anyone does mean a degree of management,

and you do need to be aware of that.

You can't hire an employee and expect them to completely manage themselves

and be no additional work for you whatsoever.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

And if you do decide to hire, there are certain things that you need to consider.

First of all hire to fill your weaknesses.

We have this tendency to hire a clone of ourselves,

but actually what we need is somebody that can fill in and do the jobs we hate.

For example if you're weak at doing admin, get yourself a project manager.

If you don't like doing finances, hire yourself an accountant.

You get the idea, but remember what I said earlier,

the one position you can't fill no matter how much you hate it is sales.

That is something, unfortunately, you need to be actively involved in

and cannot avoid.

Remember it's not just about the skills of the person you're hiring.

Don't become so obsessed with whether they use jQuery

or whether they know Ruby on Rails or whatever else.

There are other things to consider beyond just their skillset.

You need to hire people based on their personality and not just skills.

Afterall you're going to have to work with these people day in and day out.

So it's important that they're people you like and can get on with.

Hire like-minded people, but that doesn't necessarily mean

they need to be the same temperment as you.

It just means that you have to view the world and view work

in a vaguely similar way.

You actually could do with having people that view things

and approach things in a slightly different way to you in order to balance you.

For example, I'm very lucky in the 2 people I co-founded my company with

because they're both very different personalities to me,

although we have the same attitudes towards business.

One of my colleagues is incredibly good at dealing with detail

and making sure that things work

while I tend to be big picture, visionary kind of guy.

So we complement each other beautifully.

But my last piece of advice when it comes to hiring someone

is hire someone that likes to tinker—that likes to play with the web—

that likes to experiment and try new things.

The web is so dynamic, and things are changing so often

that hiring for a particular skillset may be relevant now,

but it won't be relevant in a year or 2 years

because things will change.

So what you need is someone who is passionate about learning,

passionate about the web, and passionate about trying new things.