Does hiring someone you don’t already know make you nervous?

It should.

Jack Welch, retired CEO of GE, says:

Hiring is hard work.

Hiring great people is brutally hard.

And if finding great employees is hard for GE, with more than 300,000 people, it’s just that much harder when you’re doing it the first time.  Hiring is Hard, the home study course, was created to help entrepreneurs turn “brutally hard” into “a system that can be mastered.”

It’s time to hire an employee

You’re getting clients; you’re working 80-hour weeks, and you’ve missed too many recitals and soccer games. You wanted to start a business, but it’s turning into a life sentence. Your virtual assistant is maxed out and the work of your business needs real help, not virtual. You need to hire a real employee.

Hiring IS hard. If Jack Welch, with a great HR department at his back, thinks so, we’re not going to pretend otherwise.  There’s a lot to know, and some uncomfortable penalties for getting parts of hiring wrong:

• Federal and state laws
• Costs
• Job descriptions
• Help-wanted ads
• The IRS
• The INS and Homeland Security
• EEOC
• Interviewing
• Reporting
• Background investigation and drug testing
• Withholding taxes

If developing a hiring system was what you wanted to do for a living, you would have started an HR consultancy, not the business you’re running today.

Where do you start?

Hiring is Hard: How to hire your third* employee, the home study, is your guide. It was created for two types of business owners:

• the entrepreneur who has never hired someone he didn’t know before*
• the business owner who has hired employees in the corporate world with a corporate Human Resources department managing the hiring process behind the scenes, who now has to hire someone into her new small business

*The title–third employee–is a nod to the fact that most business owners hire their first or second employee without much thought.  Mom. Your former co-worker.  The guy down the street.  A teacher who’s off for the summer.  A neighborhood teenager.  It’s when you need to hire someone you don’t already know that hiring gets really hard.

The Hiring is Hard system is laid out in a series of steps that will take you from working 100-hour solo weeks to bringing on the employees you need.

Why not just read a book?

I looked at a lot of material in the process of creating this course.  Many of the most highly-recommended “how to hire” books are written for managers in corporate jobs, who have an HR department screening resumes, staying on top of the latest legal requirements, and processing all the paperwork.  A few other books target businesses who hire large numbers of lower wage, hourly workers.  Very few resources start at the very beginning, helping you to build a repeatable hiring system that will bring new employees into your business effectively and legally.

But it’s all on the web…

It is.  “How to hire” lists are all over the web.  At last count, at least 105 different sites will tell you how to hire employees in the United States.  These sites provide information in different formats, with different steps, emphasizing different risks and strategies.  I’ve reviewed some of the “how to hire” pages in the blog on this site.  If one-page, 10-step processes work for other, equally challenging areas of your business, I recommend starting with the information at IRS.gov.  You can trust the IRS to be correct.  “Easy-to-follow” is a different matter altogether.

What’s your time worth?

As a business owner, you have two responsibilities–

• to see that the work gets done
• to build systems that will support your business’ growth and success

When you first think of hiring a new employee, you may be thinking about the first responsibility.  Truth is, you are also setting the stage for addressing the second.  There’s no reason to waste the effort that you put into finding your first employee.  When documented, the work you put into hiring your first employee becomes the first draft of a system that can be improved every time you hire someone new.

Build a hiring system

Hiring is Hard focuses on the process at least as much as the result, helping you to develop a hiring system.  You can use it once to hire your first, or third, employee, and then again in the future as your business grows.  You can create a framework for thinking about recruiting and hiring and teaching employees how your business hires.

When your business has more than 10 employees, additional federal employment laws begin to take effect.  By that time, you will be prepared to talk intelligently with HR outsourcing vendors and know what parts of hiring you want to keep in-house and which parts you want to pay someone else to manage for you.

What’s in the package?

The course has nine steps.  Each of the steps is a lot of work. Dividing the work into fewer steps may make for a easier sell, but it doesn’t change everything you have to do. After lead generation, hiring good employees is the single most important factor in determining how your business will grow.  It is hard.  If hiring good employees were easy, everybody would be doing it well.

Hiring is Hard:  How to Hire Your Third Employee is approximately 150 pages of written material, with worksheets and forms that you can use to create a job description, a help wanted ad, and track on-going recruiting activities.  Hiring is Hard is a PDF document, so you can download it and get starting making decisions about how your business will hire right away.  You can print any of the pages if you work better on paper.  The forms are delivered as MS Word documents, so you can add your business name and logo and use them right away. The material is also provided in audio (MP3) format so that you can listen when you don’t have time to read.

What’s in the course?

The individual course modules are:

• Introduction—overview, hiring theory, myths that first-time employers sometimes believe, knowing when to hire, risks to be aware of
• Hiring Law—an overview of US federal and state employment law, and the IRS’ role in employment (hint—they like it, but they have funny ways of showing that). (I know the IRS is not the law.  They’re close enough for these purposes.)
• Decisions, Decisions—decisions that entrepreneurs need to make (long) before they place a help wanted ad, starting with, “what does it mean to be a great place to work?”
• Planning a Hire—timelines, project plans, other businesses that can help you with hiring (for a fee)
• Defining the Work—writing the job description
• Attracting Candidates—marketing to get employees
• Interviewing—screening resumes, planning interviews, designing questions, questions you can’t ask
• Evaluating Interview Results—how to pick the good employees, formal verification and why you need a verification process
• Making the Hire—offers, packages, responding to counteroffers
• On-Boarding—how to bring your new employee into the business in a way that increases the odds she’ll stay
• And Again—using the results of your first hire to improve your process for subsequent hires; metrics that will let you talk to recruiters and professional employment organizations from a position of knowledge
• Resources—additional reading and background material that didn’t fit into the main flow of the course

Ali Luke, of Aliventures, says,

Hiring is Hard is a comprehensive guide to hiring your first — and second, and third — employee. As a small business owner working on alone, the world of hiring has always seemed far above my head. This ebook broke the process into sensible steps, and explained lots of pitfalls that I’d have been clueless about on my own. There’s a ton of very focused, concrete advice about the ins and outs of US law, as well as loads of practical tips on how to write job descriptions, conduct interviews and more. A must-read if you’re considering hiring employees — whether or not you think you already know how to hire!

***

	Pre-release	After launch
Hiring is Hard: How to Hire Your Third Employee Complete guide, in PDF format, worth $197.
Workbook to accompany Hiring is Hard.
Premium Bonus:Hiring is Hard Audio, in MP3 format, worth $99
	Pre-release	Regular price
Price	$47	$197

The system is offered at a pre-release, 75% discount. If you buy now, you will get the 150-page guide immediately.

The workbook will be available in a week, and the audio is being recorded as fast as it can be. Once the entire package is ready, the price will rise to $197. If what you are planning to hire an employee within six months, why wait? You have a lot of preparation to do now.

Red Tuxedo Good Service Guarantee

I’ve been burned in the past when I’ve purchased products I couldn’t return.  I don’t want you to feel the way I did. I stand behind my products.

Here’s the Red Tuxedo Good Service Guarantee:

If, after you own Hiring is Hard: How to Hire Your Third Employee, you aren’t happy with the course, let me know, within a year. I’ll refund your money. Even if you read and listen to the material and decide, “Oh, heavens, she was right, Hiring is Hard! It’s more than I can manage and I’m going to stay solo and work with virtual assistants instead.” OK by me.

If you know of someone who is hiring, feel free to pass the course materials on, if it is within a year of your date of purchase. The US hiring laws change too fast for me to be able to be sure the material is up-to-date any longer than that.

You get your money back, and you get to be help another business owner. If you let me know what you didn’t like about the material, I may be able to point you to a resource that can help you better. (But this part isn’t guaranteed.)

I used to be worried about giving guarantees like this, but I’ve learned that almost no one takes advantage of me. Business owners and hiring managers understand that they are responsible for doing the work (you notice, I’m not guaranteeing that your employees will always understand the same thing! but they will if you hire the right ones…).

Still not sure? Give me a call at 919/395-5148, or send me an email to karen at hiringhowto dot com. The phone’s answered during US EST business hours.

What happens after you click on the “Buy Now” PayPal link

When you click on the Buy Now PayPal link, you’ll go to a new page on the PayPal.com site where you can login and make a payment.  After you get confirmation, PayPal will send you to a page where you can download the home study course.
If you have any questions, give me a call at 919/395-5148, or send me an email to karen at hiringhowto dot com. The phone’s answered during US EST business hours.