Hiring Deserving Workers for your Membership Website business

By David Eedle |

Once revenue flows, and after usually massive efforts on the part of the founder or founders of a new venture, the easiest red herring to fall for is that you need to hire a bunch of staff to help you run and build this business. The truth is that hiring staff is very tricky indeed and most people are not capable of simply hitting the ground running in a start-up. Very few new hires we’ve made (except a handful of exceptional people) were dedicated and determined enough to learn their role quickly and to take leadership of their area of responsibility. We still remember the hundreds of applications we got for a couple of intern positions we advertised in our own Jobs Bulletin – we sifted through them all, discarding the strangest, most off-the-wall and narrowed down to a few that looked okay.

Be careful hiring employees who could become a problem

Of the two people we hired, neither was right for our business, so instead of doing what we should have done at the end of their summer intern period, and let them go – we hired them in part-time positions. Even though hiring people is time-consuming, often confusing and always risky, if you truly need an extra set of hands, then instead of just making do with not-quite-right hires, we advise you to go through the process of recruiting until you do find staff you’re convinced can and will do what you’re asking in the role on offer. And of course, who actually want the job!

Don’t be afraid to only offer casual positions until you find the right candidate fit for your business, and your way of doing business. There is so much management material written about the employer’s need to look after, in every way humanly possible, the needs of the employee, but we found that once we stopped focusing on being great employers and focused more on having great people around us who also believed in our product, that our business functioned increasingly well, turned from unprofitable to massively profitable, and we had much more fun (and so did our staff).

In the early days of Arts Hub we were so humbled by the fact that our little Internet venture was actually working, people were signing up for new memberships and revenue was growing month-on-month, that we just gave jobs to not necessarily deserving workers.

Another part of keeping it simple is that if you do need to hire people in your business (and we would advocate automating as many business processes as possible before you do that) make sure you’re completely clear on the role and what kind of person you need to fill it. The right person in the right job with the right attitude will help the business to run smoothly. Ill-fitting staff just consume way more of your time and the company’s resource than is necessary – generally this means they’re there for the wrong reasons. It was a big shock to us to find out the cold truth that most of the people we hired in the early days of Arts Hub just took the job because we were a rather sexy, new Internet business and working for us made them look cool to their friends. Beyond that none of them had anything meaningful to offer. Don’t carry passengers. Hire the right people or don’t hire at all.

Image credit: Flickr mio_please

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