How do you hire people?

I run an agency, together with a small team. I'm not the CEO, but share the task of hiring people with her.

It's hard, and to me, it always feels like guesswork. We try to predict the amount of work we'll have coming up, and then explore many different channels to find good people. Once we have a promising candidate, we interview them and let them send us work examples (or do a work sample, if they prefer). Sometimes it works well, sometimes we need to adjust strategy.

The key lessons I've learnt so far are probably these:

• Don't hire when you need people. That's too late - do the work, and prepare for hiring/subcontracting when you're not stressed out, otherwise you'll probably do a bad hire. We hired a consultant who seemed fine when we were swamped with work. He failed to deliver, and it cost us a huge amount of time to clean his failure up.
• Mentorship is a huge job in itself. Plan accordingly. I've started budgeting at least 50% of my working time as mentoring and internal support, for a team of 6.
• People will not do the job the same way you do. That's okay (most of the time), but hard to accept if you're used to doing things a certain way.
• The best predictor if it's a good employee - unless a very specialized skillset is needed, which generally isn't true when it comes to web development - are the soft skills. How is the person managing time? How is he/she communicating? And so forth.
• If you make a bad hire, correct as soon as possible. It only gets harder the longer you take.

If you've been around the block I suspect these lessons are pretty basic, but they were very valuable insights to me. They are the same regardless if you subcontract or straight out hire someone.

I would definitely test the waters by hiring contractors before hiring employees.

Here are some tips from my experience, in no particular order:

• You get out what you put in. If the job post is no good, good applicants may be turned off.
• On Upwork, at least, the market is relatively efficient. If you pay $10/hour, you can expect, on average, $10/hour quality work.
• When posting on Upwork, it's a bad idea to include identifying information in the ad. I have - no joke - had an aggressive contractor track me down and text message me. Add that to dozens of spam emails through my contact form.
• When you find a good, reliable contractor, hang on to them for dear life.
• Use fixed price contracts with milestones.

I'm a web designer/developer. The best way of doing it is instead of actually "hiring" people, you subcontract them. For example, let's say you need a website creating, you send them the brief and get a price from them and pay them on a per project basis.

Obviously you'd carry out the usual checks, see if you like their portfolio, etc.

I've worked with various freelancers in the past for small-scoped projects. I think this is the best way to find the people you like to work with (and vice versa). You know their quality, way of communicating, things they can improve, etc.

I don't have people working FT, only parttime. If they decide to part ways, that would be annoying, but not too bad. I've found them through Upwork or recs from friends and acquaintances.

I'm in the same boat. Not sure how to hire!

One thing I noticed with agencies. They seem to interview people even when they don't have jobs available. It seems obvious but we are never aware of when opportunities will come up and we will need that particular person skills.

So having a process of interviewing potential candidates and keeping them in the backup seems like a solution I'll try in the coming weeks and months.

That will give me time to compare and see if the person really is a good fit for the project or team. Instead of hiring someone in urgency and risking him/her bailing you.

Founder of HackerHitch here.

Depending on the longevity of the product, you might want to hire contractors on a contractual recurring (40/20 hrs per week or hourly), or project basis.

In terms of fear of workers leaving, essentially not holding up their end of the bargain, I would highly suggest using a company, such as HackerHitch, to facilitate the management around the contractor you wish to employ. Unlike services such as Upwork, we not only find you a well vetted and reliable freelancer, but, we offer guarantees around the work they intend to do, their performance, and offer trial periods for contractors.

If that sounds ideal for you, feel free to check us out at http://hackerhitch.com/

1. fear is the mind killer ( just had to throw in the dune reference :) )
2. if your intention is that the business will grow to sustain employees, then go with employing someone full time.
3. Finding someone who fits in well with you is the next trick. There's so much advice in this area, but the thing I find works best is to code something together and have discussions with them around the creative process ( users / ux / coding / design / test / deployment / support ). Most of the time good hires are really obviously good hires.