A Guide to Hiring Your First Employee

When starting an ecommerce business, the possibilities appear to be endless. It’s an exciting journey—and when you hit those first few major milestones, you know that you’re on the right track.

Whether it be the achievement of your first large wholesale order or the need to hire your first employee, these “firsts” help drive the motivated business owner within you.

Speaking of your first hire, this is not exactly a simple process. This guide will support you as you seek and hire the best possible candidate to grow your small (yet growing) ecommerce team.

How to Make Your First Hire: Tips and Tricks to Find the Best Fit

If you’ve never hired anyone before, it’s a rather daunting process. How do you find someone who will truly understand your business and evolving objectives?

Although each scenario is unique, as an ecommerce business grows, help is needed to ensure greater productivity and, in turn, high revenue. Once you reach this point, the range of fulfillments will begin to increase—and without a staffing plan, you could quickly fall behind.

Unfortunately, this could impact your reputation. A recent survey revealed that online reviews have been shown to impact 93% of purchasing decisions. So you can imagine how a couple of bad reviews will impact your business.

This brings us to the first step: deciding what you need to delegate and how often. By determining what you need to delegate, you can define the qualifications required, as well as your intended budget. More often than not, the first employee hired by an ecommerce business is someone who helps get products to customers while supporting growth (i.e. a marketing expert or a customer service/sales rep).

If you require 10-30 hours per week, it may be ideal to invest in an independent contractor or third-party vendor. This will help you save on certain salary obligations and benefits.

Overall, you need to sit down and ask yourself:

• Where is my attention needed…