The first employee turns a job into a business. It also doubles your fixed costs overnight, adds legal obligations, and forces you to explain things you have only ever kept in your head. Most of the pain comes from doing the steps in the wrong order. Here is the order that works.
1. Write down what you actually do
Before you write a job description, spend a week logging your tasks in fifteen-minute blocks. You will find that about a third of your time goes to work someone else could do with modest training. That third is the job.
2. Decide what the hire must produce
Not tasks, outcomes. “Answer every enquiry within two hours” and “deliver five installations a week” are outcomes. Hire against outcomes and you can judge the hire in ninety days without guesswork.
3. Check the money
Total cost is salary plus employer taxes, insurance, equipment and your own time training them, usually 1.3 to 1.5 times the salary. Make sure the business can carry that for six months even if the hire adds no revenue, because for the first two or three it will not.
4. Do the paperwork before the offer
Register as an employer, set up payroll, get the insurance your country requires, and draft the contract. Doing this after the person has accepted is how start dates slip by a month.
5. Recruit from people who already know you
Customers, suppliers and former colleagues produce better first hires than job boards. Describe the outcomes, not the title, and ask who they would recommend.
6. Plan the first two weeks hour by hour
A new employee with nothing to do on day one forms an opinion of the business that is hard to change. Shadowing, documented processes, and one real responsibility by the end of week one.
7. Review at thirty, sixty and ninety days
Short conversations against the outcomes you wrote in step two. Problems found at thirty days are fixable; problems found at a year rarely are.