Making Your First Hire: How a Business Coach Can Guide You

Making your first hire can be daunting. Will this person maintain the level of quality you expect? Will you have the time to manage and train them? And can you afford to pay another salary?

Luckily this is something a business coach helps their clients with on a regular basis. Business coaching programs help business owners navigate challenges like this by providing accountability, practical tools and advice based on experience.

Let’s look at the benefits of business coaching for hiring and how a coach could help you identify the right candidate, design a reliable interview process and set yourself up for long-term success with a top team.

Common Fears

Here are some of the most common fears I hear from my coaching clients preparing to make their first hire and how I would address them.

Finances: When can I afford to hire someone? And how much can I afford to pay them?

A coach can help you create a detailed cash flow forecast. A cash flow forecast tells you how much cash you will have at the end of any given month based on best, worst and average case forecasts.

A coach can also help you understand the skill and experience level you need to hire for – and therefore the salary you can expect to pay. For instance, a salesperson on £25,000 a year will need much more guidance than one on £80,000 a year and there’s likely to be a significant difference in performance, at least initially. If you don’t have the cash a coach can help you establish if you have the time, skills and capacity to train up someone who is less experienced.

With a cashflow forecast and a clear cost estimate you should feel more confident about your hiring decision.

Work Quality: Can I really trust someone to do the job well enough?

As well as working through these worries with you, a coach can help you to put systems in place that will ensure quality doesn’t dip and that whoever you hire actually does save you time. They can draw from their experience of what has worked for other businesses to develop safeguards that will keep things moving smoothly as you expand.

There’s also the fear of relinquishing control. This is your business – it’s always going to be difficult to let someone else in.

Business coaches for entrepreneurs inevitably have to challenge their clients on their mindset around leadership. I typically encourage clients to move away from the belief that you have to be involved in everything. By helping you narrow down the high-level tasks that need your input and the lower level tasks you can safely delegate, I try to help clients make the transition from working in your business to working on it.

Whatever your specific concerns are, a coach provides an objective perspective and keeps you accountable. The process changes hiring your first employee from an emotional experience to a logical one.

How business coaching can help you identify the right candidate

“People are not your most important asset. The right people are” – Jim Collins

The process of identifying the right candidate should start well before you go anywhere near Indeed or LinkedIn. A clearly defined job description and person specification are essential. This groundwork gives you clear criteria to combine with what your gut instincts tell you.

Business coaches can help with this in many ways:

• Defining The Skills You Need – A coach can help you come up with a list of the skills, experience and qualifications someone needs from day one. This list should be comprehensive but not exhaustive – it’s a good chance to identify desirable skills that someone can learn on the job or alternative ways they can prove they have the necessary knowledge.
• Attitudes and Values – Looking for someone who shares the values and attitudes at the heart of your business means you’re far more likely to hire someone who is a good fit. A coach can help you work backwards from where you want to be to the values and attitudes your staff need to make it happen.
• Designing Assessments – A coach can help you come up with robust ways of testing for your desired skills and values.
• Designing the Job Ad – Your job ad needs to sell the role and your vision for the business to potential candidates. Your coach can help you ensure it says everything it needs to and appeals to your target audience.
• Providing Other Insights – Coaches will all have tips and tricks developed from experience. For example, at the Business Growth Agency, we think the key to a smooth recruitment process is to gently encourage unsuitable people to deselect themselves from the recruitment process.

The role of business coaching in the interview process

Preparation is the key to conducting interviews that actually draw out information you can use to guide your final decision.

A coach can work with you to script questions to test for the attitudes and behaviours you’re looking for. These will be designed to get the person to offer specific examples from their lived experience and avoid generic answers.

One major problem in interviews is that the candidate often says what they think you want to hear. A coach can draw from their professional experience of working with people to help you avoid leading questions and ensure you’re not unintentionally hinting at the answer you want.

A coach can also help you rehearse an interview through roleplay. While this might seem a little awkward (and it can be at first!), it helps you get a sense of how things might play out on the day and means you can prepare strategies for when things don’t go as expected.

Lastly, a coach can be an objective voice of reason while you evaluate candidates. They can hold you accountable and make sure you’re not letting other factors tempt you away from the evaluation criteria you originally set.

How business coaching can support onboarding and integration

An effective onboarding process sets your first hire up for success and establishes a strong working relationship. Glassdoor found that employees who rated their onboarding as “highly effective” were 18 times more likely to feel highly committed to their organisation.

A coach can share frameworks and insights that have worked for other businesses, streamlining the process for you. They can advise on getting the balance right between being thorough and not overwhelming the new hire.

Because you’re an expert in your business, it can be difficult to step into the shoes of a newcomer. A coach can give you an outsider’s perspective and identify the inevitable gaps in your onboarding process that come about due to what’s sometimes called the ‘curse of knowledge‘. This is the phenomenon where somebody who’s very experienced forgets what it was like to see things for the first time. Think about TV remote control designers: they know exactly what the label “Aux Direct 2” means because they spent years designing the technology but an outsider seeing it for the first time has no idea.

Lastly, they can help you during the probation process. As Dan, one of our coaches at the Business Growth Agency, puts it: “I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to let someone pass their probation because they seem like a nice person. Having a coach means there’s someone there to challenge you and ensure all decisions you make are in line with your business goals.”

We hope these tips have been useful and best of luck building your new team!

Thinking about starting to build your team? Book a free session with one of our coaches. We can set you on the path towards hiring the right person and explain more about how business coaching services can support you throughout the process.