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Who Should I Hire?
3:31 with Paul BoagDesigners are faced with multiple questions when considering expanding their team: hire, or partner with someone? What kind of person should I find? And, does it all come down to the skills they have?
Okay so maybe I've given you a little bit of encouragement
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to consider hiring your first employee.
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If you do go down the route, the next question is,
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"Well who should I hire?"
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A lot of freelancers have this habit of sidestepping the issue
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of hiring their first employee by working in partnership with other freelancers.
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And it certainly is an option, but it does have some disadvantages
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that you need to be aware of.
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Firstly if you work with other freelancers, you're giving away
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a big chunk of your profit margin
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and none of us really want to do that.
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But secondly you can find yourself turned into a glorified project manager
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where you're dealing with the client and all of the associated problems
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and someone else is doing the fun work that you prefer to be doing yourself.
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Taking on anyone does mean a degree of management,
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and you do need to be aware of that.
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You can't hire an employee and expect them to completely manage themselves
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and be no additional work for you whatsoever.
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But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
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And if you do decide to hire, there are certain things that you need to consider.
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First of all hire to fill your weaknesses.
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We have this tendency to hire a clone of ourselves,
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but actually what we need is somebody that can fill in and do the jobs we hate.
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For example if you're weak at doing admin, get yourself a project manager.
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If you don't like doing finances, hire yourself an accountant.
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You get the idea, but remember what I said earlier,
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the one position you can't fill no matter how much you hate it is sales.
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That is something, unfortunately, you need to be actively involved in
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and cannot avoid.
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Remember it's not just about the skills of the person you're hiring.
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Don't become so obsessed with whether they use jQuery
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or whether they know Ruby on Rails or whatever else.
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There are other things to consider beyond just their skillset.
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You need to hire people based on their personality and not just skills.
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Afterall you're going to have to work with these people day in and day out.
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So it's important that they're people you like and can get on with.
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Hire like-minded people, but that doesn't necessarily mean
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they need to be the same temperment as you.
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It just means that you have to view the world and view work
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in a vaguely similar way.
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You actually could do with having people that view things
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and approach things in a slightly different way to you in order to balance you.
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For example, I'm very lucky in the 2 people I co-founded my company with
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because they're both very different personalities to me,
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although we have the same attitudes towards business.
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One of my colleagues is incredibly good at dealing with detail
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and making sure that things work
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while I tend to be big picture, visionary kind of guy.
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So we complement each other beautifully.
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But my last piece of advice when it comes to hiring someone
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is hire someone that likes to tinker—that likes to play with the web—
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that likes to experiment and try new things.
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The web is so dynamic, and things are changing so often
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that hiring for a particular skillset may be relevant now,
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but it won't be relevant in a year or 2 years
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because things will change.
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So what you need is someone who is passionate about learning,
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passionate about the web, and passionate about trying new things.
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