As your business grows you’ll need new skills and capacity which you cannot provide yourself or from your existing workforce. If you’re taking on staff for the first time you will need to register with HMRC as an employer.

It is a legal requirement that you take out Employer’s Liability Insurance before taking on your first employee, talk to your insurance company about adding this onto your policy.

Access free on-line tools to help you recruit the right staff at a time and place convenient to you!

Hiring the right person

You need to put some thought into what your business needs, employing someone is often one of the biggest steps a business will make and getting the right person is vital. Some things to consider are:

• do you need someone with experience or would employing an apprentice who can develop with your company be better?
• what skills do you need? What are you and your existing workforce struggling with? It’s worth writing down what you’re looking for.
• do you need someone full-time or part-time? Is a job share a possibility?
• will they work from your premises or from home?
• will you need to provide them with resources such as computers and mobile phones?

Once you’ve answered these questions think about how you’re going to find the right person, traditionally job adverts would have been placed in the local paper but now many businesses advertise via their own website and social media or using LinkedIn to search for the right skills.

If you’ve decided to employ an apprentice the training provider you work with will often have a process in place to match you with potential apprentices so talk to them about how that will work. It’s also worth considering recommendations for interview from people you know or existing staff.

Make sure you have a recruitment process in place that will be fair to the applicants and ensure you get the right person for the role. If you’re a sole trader it may be worth considering getting someone you trust to be part of the process as a critical friend, they may pick up on things you haven’t noticed.

Training your staff

You may decide that the skills you need can be brought into the business by training existing staff. There are lots more options for training now with the changes in technology we’ve experienced. You need to consider whether you need accredited training-which leads to an recognised qualification- or skills based training where no qualification is gained.

Some of the options for training nowadays are:

• via colleges and universities-these are often accredited training but non-accredited courses are now also offered.
• short courses offered by local organisations, find out what’s on near you through our events calendar.
• Youtube has become a great place to find out how to do things but you do need to make sure the source of the information is a good one as anyone can upload a video. Is the source a business or organisation you recognise and can trust? Why not check out our Youtube channel?

If you will require your employees to drive as part of their job there is free training available to help you manage any risks involved.

Have you considered that you’re training as you read this? Information we gain as we look around on trusted websites develops our skills in the same way courses do.