Thinking To Hire The First Employee

How Do you go about setting the requirements and measuring succes?

[Erku]

I am thinking to hire my first employee. How do you set the requirements and measure the success. The web traffic grows each month anyway, so how do you measure the success?

Anyone has had the same experience?

We don't sell any product, but just monetize on publishing and advertising.

[Stores]

Setting requirements and measuring success really depends on what you expect this employee to do for you. Their responsibilities should be measurable and they should be held accountable to meet their goals.

For example, maybe one of this employee's responsibilities is to add content to the site. You should make a goal for them to create 20 new pages per week. You can measure the success based on of it is completed on time and if it meets your expectations.

If you want to give them an extra layer of responsibility, kick the requirements up a notch.

For example, their responsibility would be to launch new content aimed at improving search results for 50 specific keywords in the next 3 months. You can benchmark current results and compare against the future to see if they are performing.

Most everything is measurable to a degree, it all depends on how you look at it. Without giving them clear goals to try and achieve, they most likely won't meet your expectations and can't be held accountable for goals that aren't communicated to them.

[absolutelyme]

Managing people sux!

[Rightz]

Can I recommend setting a practical interview (with a time limit).

I once had an job interview where the first interview was a group one, the second was a one on one interview and the last interview was practical.

They set little tasks like:

Find the error in the html page and correct it (the images weren't showing as the file path was wrong).

Make a animated gif (to your specs and with a small file size limit)

Obviously depends on the job they will be doing but at the interview process it certainly weeds out the bull#*$!ters.

[edited by: Rightz at 11:58 am (utc) on Nov. 21, 2006]

[Lexur]

Employee management is the hardest part of the small webmaster/businessman work.

Take a pencil and list the task you can assign to your employee and beside the list write the units your worker must produce. Then, have an interview with the three or four best contenders and let them do it for a half hour. When you looked them at work (don't cry) and select just the fastest.

[idolw]

depends what you want them to do.
if you want them to build content - set number of new pages per week.
if you want them to build links - set minimum number of links gained per week.
if you want them to do adwords and start MFA business - they should at least be paying for themselves at the start.

just remember, all you do will be very new for that person and you must allow a pretty long cooling off period for your new employee.

i strongly encourage you to hire someone. it is a lot of fun and is very good for business.
we cannot stop hiring ;)

[Erku]

Thank you everyone for your great advice. I do appreciate it.

The new employee is the sister of a friend who is very talented. She says she can work only 4 hours a day. I want to be fair to her and know that she is a very responsible person. What would be a reasonable number of pages that I can ask her to produce each day, for 4 hours per day? I mean like unique content.

[Essex_boy]

Always take up references.

In my first business I didnt and wished I had done.

[Stores]

What would be a reasonable number of pages that I can ask her to produce each day, for 4 hours per day? I mean like unique content.

How many pages can you create in 4 hours? Is it reasonable to expect this person to create an equal amount? more? less?

[Erku]

You know I have not tried to create pages in that regard. So what would be a reasonable number of pages to be created in four hours?

[gregbo]

Perhaps you should step back a bit and ask yourself why you are hiring someone. You should have some idea of what the person will be working on. I would think she'd be working on something you're currently working on, so that frees you up to do other things.

[j_h_maccann]

It is very hard indeed to figure out how to manage people doing tasks that you don't know how to do yourself--and usually not a good idea. Instead, find a professional service to do that function on a contract basis, so they supply their own management. Then you only need to figure out what you want.

This approach works at every level. Most business managers know nothing about managing cleaners, setting work levels, supervising results; they do better to hire a cleaning service headed by someone who does know these things. At the FTSE100 level, it's very tough managing parts of the business involving professionals such as doctors and lawyers without some personal knowledge. And, as everyone here knows, large corporate managers usually make a complete hash of trying to manage website creation because there no one in the whole management hierarchy who knows how to do it.

[danidarling]

We own a construction company and thus, our people are independent contractors that border on employees and have to produce to earn their fairly substantial hourly rates. That said:

I would not set specific quotas, but would learn enough about what they were doing to have a clue how productive they are, and go from there. Like in construction, I know how long it takes to frame a wall if the situation is perfect. BUT---There are many times that the slab isn't square, or the floor is out of level, or it has to meet an exsisting wall perfectly; This takes extra time....Ahh but how much? Do you see what I'm saying? I get a feel pretty quick for how well they "fit" the job,if they're a good producer, and --bottom line, if they are worth what you're paying them.

Danielle