Recruiting Your First Member of Staff

Hey everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Today I am talking about a topic that we haven't discussed before on the podcast and that is all about hiring your first member of staff. Now, I've really seen the good, the bad and the ugly of how not to do this and how to make this a very expensive mistake. So in today's episode, we're going to explore when you should hire someone, whether it should be a freelancer or an in house person, and some of the pitfalls and processes you need to follow to make sure you're giving yourself the best chance for you to find the right person and for them to be successful. So let's get on with today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa. Hey everybody. I hope you're having a brilliant week. Now, as you grow your agency, you're going to naturally get to the point where you just don't have enough capacity to keep serving your clients. And if you aspire to grow, then you're going to want to increase your capacity, which means taking on a freelancer or taking on a full time member of staff. And one of the questions that I get frequently asked by my coaching community is, and other people who are running agencies is when should I hire someone and should it be a freelance person or should it be an in house person? So those are some of the points that I want to tackle first of all, and then I'll get on to talking about the recruitment process, the interview process, the onboarding process, and how to make sure you get that right and give yourself the best chance of finding the great fit person and then increasing your capacity because they do a great job, leaving you to focus on your superpower, which means winning new clients, looking at the future of your agency, growing your agency. So you may have started your agency as a freelancer. You've got really busy and now you're thinking, look, I need an extra pair of hands, so what do I do next? And again, as I said, that's a question that I get asked often. And so the first thing I would say is it's really important to have a documented vision because you need to have a sense of where you want to head and you want to be in control of that journey. And that starts by having a documented vision. Now I know that is a whole other topic, so I'm not going to get into that today. But, but suffice it to Say, just know where you're headed, know how big you want to grow so that you can plot that roadmap. So anyway, so the question I get asked a lot is, okay, I need an extra pair of hands. Should I hire a freelancer or should I hire an in house person? And of course, there are pros and cons to both those approaches. So let's just take a couple of moments to explore them. So let's start off by thinking, okay, the safest bet is for me to hire a freelancer. So obviously the pros for that for you is it's less risky for your business and for your finances. You can obviously ebb and flow. How much you use a freelancer based on the needs of your clients, because you're going to hire them to hire them to do a specific piece of work and hopefully they will do a good job just delivering that specific piece of work. Now, one of some of the negatives about hiring freelancers is that you kind of have less control and less visibility of your team. If they're all freelancers, a freelancer typically has got their own agenda for their own, so they won't necessarily buy into your vision or even the culture of your business. And that can be a challenge at times. And of course it's pretty risky introducing freelancers to your clients, although you can do that, but you need to have a really great relationship and feel really confident in them before you'll do that. So that's the pros and cons of a freelancer. Now let's look at the pros and cons of bringing an in house employee. So obviously when you bring an in house employee on board, you are creating greater capacity in your agency to take on more work. And hopefully those team members buy into your culture and your vision and they will go the extra mile, which means you can often get them to do more things than the specific tasks you're asking for. And of course, by hiring in house team members, you are creating a really solid platform to grow your agency. I always say that growing. If you try to grow an agency just using freelance staff, it's a bit like building a building on quicksand. And it's really difficult to do that for all the reasons I've just mentioned. That's not to say that it's not impossible. And there are a lot of examples of agencies who have managed to build their business using freelance staff or at least a hybrid model, which is something we'll talk a little bit more about later on. So you just have to make that decision. Now, obviously in the early days, hiring a freelance member of staff is probably going to be the best bet. And what I would say to you is make sure you are measuring really carefully how much money and time you're giving that freelancer and know what the metric would be like to hire someone to replace them. So that would look like how long you have been earning certain amounts of revenue which you have to outsource to the freelancer and what levels of activity you're outsourcing to them. And when those numbers start to look like the cost of an in house person, that is definitely a trigger point for you to start thinking about, actually, let's bring this person in house. And as I mentioned just now, quite a few agencies are using a sort of hybrid model where they have a core group of people in house and then they have other skills that they use via freelancers. And you know, broadly speaking, I always say there's two times you would want to use freelance staff. One is when you've got capacity issues in your agency, that is, you're really busy, you need to get some extra resources really quickly and you're not confident that you're going to sustain that level of busyness. And the second time you would use a freelancer is when you need to have some specialist skills that you don't necessarily want to have in house. So for example, you might be a PR agency and a client has said, look, we'd really like some help with some paid advertising, whether that be Google Ads or Facebook ads or whatever. And you want to be able to provide that service to your client because it naturally fits with what you already do. But you don't necessarily want those skills in house. So that would be a great time to outsource to a freelancer. But anyway, so those are some of the decisions that you can make about whether you use a freelancer or whether you hire in house. And often for your first employee, it will be a freelancer. And as I say, when you hit certain metrics, you want to bring that role in house. That's certainly what I did when I ran my agency. We had a lot of in house staff, but we started to get more and more demand for design work. And then one day we sat down and realized that we'd outsourced nearly £100,000 worth of design work to one designer who was really reliable and did a great job. But we thought, this is crazy, we could hire two and a half people for that. So we ended up hiring two people, like a senior designer and A junior designer and opening up our studio. And then that became the catalyst to grow the studio over the next few years. Okay, so now you've made that decision, you need to find the person. I'm going to talk about finding the person in terms of recruiting in house, but actually this really applies to both of those scenarios. So one of the things you want to make sure you've done is created a clear roles and responsibilities so you know exactly who you're looking for and you also understand exactly the tasks that you're going to outsource to them. And this is really important because it will help you find the right person, it will help you crystallize exactly what you need, and it will help you measure them once they're on board to ensure that they are effective and doing the job that you expect them to do and that they understand because they've got this roles and responsibilities document. Now, I'm not going to go into the details of exactly what goes into a roles and responsibilities document, but it isn't a job description. Broadly speaking, you are identifying the key roles that someone will undertake and the depth of responsibility they have for each of those roles. And you want to use the roles and responsibilities as part of a job description. And bear in mind that a roles and responsibilities document is much more than just a document you use to recruit by, but as I said, it's a document that you use to measure and assess your team members by as well. Okay, so now you have created your roles and responsibilities. You use that to create a job description and you've gone out to market to find someone. Now obviously you can try and find someone through your network. You can also use a recruiter. And of course, all of those have pros and cons. This is a money versus time conversation. Like if you have. If you've got the time to go out and look for someone and you've got the time to sift through lots of CVs, then do it that way. If you don't have time, but you have some money, then go and find a recruiter that specializes in the type of person that you are looking for and make sure that you have a good recruiter that gives you good quality candidates. Now, when you're interviewing someone, you want to make sure that you are assessing them against the roles and responsibilities document. That is, do they have the competencies you need to do a great job in this role? However, you also want to make sure you are recruiting them against cultural fit as well. So there's two things here. Do they buy into the values and the ethos of your agency. Do they have background of working in a small agency? Because if you found an ideal person that has all those competencies, all those skills you're looking for, but they come from a very large structured organization, they're probably going to really struggle in a much less structured, smaller, organized agency environment. So make sure that you are recruiting against that cultural fit as well. And make sure you listen to your gut instinct. The number of times I've had conversations with clients where they've hired someone and it hasn't worked out, and they said, I wish I'd listened to my gut instinct. There was just something about them that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but I knew it could be problematic. And then of course, that manifests itself in the person exiting the business within three or four months. So make sure that you recruit against the roles, responsibilities, competencies you need and the cultural fit, and listen to your gut instinct. Now bear in mind that you are recruiting someone against the roles and responsibilities. And what I mean by that is that you don't need to see 20 candidates and compare them all against each other. You need to compare them against the roles and responsibilities. So if you have one candidate and they feel like an ideal fit, then you should hire them. And I apologize if they're listening to this, but I got a client that has fallen foul of this recently where they didn't have a load of people apply for the job that they were hiring for. They met this one person that they thought was really good, but they decided to hang on to make a comparison against more candidates. And of course, by the time they went back to this person to offer him the job, he'd taken a job somewhere else. So make sure you are recruiting against roles and responsibilities and your gut instinct. And if you think you found the right person, then go for it and hire them. Okay? Now, once you've hired somebody, that isn't the end of the problem, but it is the start of the journey. And I think that we need to acknowledge that in the first two or three months, you are not going to save yourself very much time by having this person on board, because you're going to spend the first two or three months getting them up to speed and embedding them. So the time that you might have spent doing client work, which they can now do, you're now going to invest that in ensuring they're successful. Now, of course, this time scale will be much shorter and much quicker if you're hiring a freelance person because you pretty much want them to hit the ground running. But so much of what I'm explaining applies to hiring freelance staff as well. And if you want to get it right, and if you want to embed them into the business, then apply what I'm talking about today and you will have much more chance of it working out. So that looks like setting up maybe a three month induction process where you are meeting this person regularly. You're spending the first few weeks getting them up to speed, learning about the expectations of the role, making sure they understand the roles and responsibilities, and learning your systems. And you're going to be meeting with them regularly to give and receive feedback about their performance and what they need from you. And you're also going to be setting lots of short term objectives and once they start delivering against them and they're going to get a sense of accomplishment because they can go, yeah, I've achieved that objective. You're going to feel happy because you know that they're on the right track. You can then ease that off a bit and maybe after the first month meet them every two weeks and set slightly longer term objectives with them. But your first three months of onboarding someone has to be to set them up to succeed. You do not want to adopt a sort of sink or swim strategy where you go, right, that person's hired, let them get on with it, I've got other fires to put out. And then of course they flounder and sink and fail and then they feel unsupported so they leave your business. And this would be true with freelancers as well as in house staff. So if you apply all the things I've spoken about so far, you're giving yourself the best chance to find and hire the right person and to get them on board and up to speed as quickly as possible and setting them up to be successful so that you can then let go and focus on your next priorities in your agency. Now, once they come to the end of that three month induction process, you're going to want to set some time bound objectives and anyone's success in your agency is going to be judged against two things. Are they delivering the roles and responsibilities and are they delivering those set of three, four or five time bound objectives that you are setting for them and if they achieve both of them, then you know that they are being successful and so do they. Now the great thing about this sort of approach to managing team members is that you put a lot of control in their hands and you create kind of grown ups rather than helpless children. So what we want in our business is a bunch of responsible adults who are accountable and take ownership. We don't want a bunch of helpless children who always blaming somebody else and are always looking at you to make all the decisions. So get this right from the start and you set the right expectations. Expectations. So your three, four or five time bound objectives need to be smart objectives. So I'm sure we all know what that means. And the old ones are the good ones, specific, measurable, actionable, recorded or relevant and time bound. And I think also I'd add on to the end of that giving feedback at the end of an objective so somebody learns. So make sure you're not setting more than five because people can't remember them and make sure those three, four or five objectives are going to help that person develop in their role. And that's specific to them. So two key differentiators here. The roles and responsibilities define the functional role of whatever that person is. Let's say they are a web designer and that's the functional role that any web designer would have. And then the three, four or five time bound objectives are specific to that person. That tells you where they are on that axis of growth and what they need to focus on next in order to develop in their role. So there you have my sort of quick tips and thoughts around hiring your first member of staff. Whether it should be freelancer, whether it should be in house, the importance of creating roles and responsibilities, how to go about recruiting, using the roles and responsibilities to find the right person, setting up a really good three month induction onboarding process, and then creating some time bound objectives. Now those objectives are going to probably be reviewed on a quarterly or six monthly basis and you want to make sure that they're taking part in setting those objectives. They're not just being thrust upon them by you, but you actually do it in a collaborative way because if you do that, they're much more likely to buy into it. Now I'm not going to get into appraisals today, but obviously one of the things that you want to make sure you're doing is having regular appraisals, probably once or twice a year with your team members and using the roles, responsibilities and the objectives to assess them as well as obviously your appraisal documents. But I'll save the detail of that for another episode because I don't want to overload you with too many things today. And today is really all about hiring that first member of staff. And you know, this can be such a minefield and I've probably heard more stories of people getting it wrong, including me, than people getting it right. So I'm just sharing with you my best practice tips that that if you can apply, you are much more likely to be successful. This is definitely one of my favorite two expressions of slowing down to speed up. Because if you invest the time to find the right person and if you invest the time to recruit the right person, if you invest the time to induct and onboard someone in a really carefully, careful, methodical way, then you are setting them and yourself and your agency up for success. So I hope that's been useful as ever. Another kind of action packed episode. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to an ebook that I've written on recruitment of staff and so have a read of that because it just digs into this in a little bit more detail. But other than that, you know the drill. Please make sure you've hit subscribe, please share the episode with your colleagues and please consider leaving a review. But other than that, I'll be back with you next week for our next guest interview in the Agency Accelerator podcast. Sam.