How To Find Office Space and Hire Employees – Delegate or Die Part 2

This is part 2 from John Cow/Jason Katzenback on how to grow a business through hiring staff. Enjoy!

In my previous post of this series “Delegate or Die – How to Hire Locally to Grow Your Business“, I talked about planning for moving your business into an office, today I am going to touch on what to look for in office space, how to find employees and how to hold interviews.

Office Space: SHOP AROUND!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am speaking to you out of experience and sharing with you what I have found to work best through trial and error. I am telling you this because I hope I can spare you from some of the HUGE mistakes I made and finding my initial office was a big mess up on my part. You see, I was so excited to be moving out of my home office that I jumped at the first office that looked half decent, which might not sound bad but 2 months later I was packing up and moving again.

1. Location: You want to make sure that your office is easy to get to. The further you are from your office you will find that you start making up excuses as to not going to the office. Do not fool yourself and think you can hire an office manager and not even head into the office, this is something that takes time to put into place and your employees need your guidance and leadership.

It is also important to consider errands, supplies and restaurants. The more central you are to other resources, the less frustrating you will find it. If you need to get stamps, paper, repairs and even food, it is extremely frustrating when you have to plan hours of your day to pick them up.

Last of all, is your office easily accessed via a bus or subway route? If you are going to have employees, you are going to want to ensure they have no excuses for not being able to get to the office.

2. Lighting: This was another huge mistake I made. I first found a great looking office but it was in the basement of the office building and there was only one small window. I thought that I could get lights but believe me, nothing replaces natural sunlight and do not underestimate how important it is.

3. Room for Growth: This was my biggest mistake of all. I did not realize how much room one person’s work area took. You need to realize that once you sign a lease, you can not easily get out of it and room for growth is not an acceptable excuse.

You need to have a clear picture of what you expect for size requirements for a one year period. The recommended space requirement per person is 250 sq/ft, which might sound like a lot but consider that is only a little more then 15 ft x 15 ft and in that space you have to fit a working station, area to move around equipment and so on. Now personally I think that is a little much but I would never budget less then 150 sq/ft per person, you do not want people bumping into each other to move around.

4. Privacy: You are going to want to ensure that you have an office with a door on it. Your employees will constantly want to talk with you and ask questions and by having a door you can make sure that you can shut the door and have your privacy to get things done. I will talk more about this in the next post when I get into managing your employees.

How To Find Suitable Employees

This is going to greatly depend on where you are located but this is what I personally found to work best.

1. Do Not Over Qualify the Job: Before you advertise the position, do not set your sights too high as you will have very few people apply for the position. Unless you need a nuclear scientist, do NOT make the job posting sound like to need a degree as one is needed to get the position.

Think about a time you may have been searching the help wanted ads, I can guarantee you that a lot of the jobs you skipped over where no where near as complicated as they made it seem. You need to be realistic as to what your expectations are for the pay level you are offering and the best thing to do is look through places like craigslist.com and your newspaper classifieds and see the type of ads people are placing and then put one together.

Do not be afraid of no response!

Do not over analyze your ad, if you get no response then you can simply alter the ad and test a different one. I also recommend you ask anyone that applies for the job how they felt about the ad. I was surprised by the fact that every person that applied for my first posting said they had no idea what the job was for. This was not good because you do not want to waste your time interviewing people who are not interested in the type of work you will give them. Here is a similar example of the second ad I ran that got a better response.

Online Marketing Assistant
FT 40 hrs per week. Responsibilities include researching, building & marketing niche websites plus data entry. We will provide training. Applicant must be proficient with Microsoft word, excel, browsing the Internet, using email and have basic html experience. $##/hr starting. Email your resume to email@youremail.com

I recommend if you are looking for someone to do these general types of duties that you use an ad similar to this but obviously tweak the ad to meet your specific needs.

2. Test the waters: Do not blast your ad to every publication in the known world. I recommend you start with your local newspaper and run an ad for one week and see what the initial response is like. If you get a good response but want more resumes submitted then test craigslist.com and monster.com

I recommend that you do not try to go to big right away. If the ad in the newspaper gets a decent response you will spend a lot of time going through the resumes, arranging interviews, contacting references and doing background checks. Run the first ad, test the waters and then if it needs be tweaked and expanded you can do it then.

Personally I have had the best luck with newspaper ads compared to craigslist and monster. I am not sure if it is because of the skill level, pay level or what but the results speak for themselves. I think if you where hiring an “accountant” or something similar to that the large job boards might do better.

3. Sound Professional: I recommend you set up an auto responder for the resume they submit that answers questions they might have. Often times they will want to know things like dress code, hours or operation, benefits and a more detailed explanation of what they will potentially do. An auto responder is an easy way to look very professional and also answers a lot of questions in advance. Thank them for submitting their resume and provide more details about the job.

NOTE: I found that by asking them to email the resume helped me filter out a few people. I had a few people email a request to mail or fax the resume because they did not know how to send one by email. If they could not do that much I figured I would rather not hire them to start with.

How to Hold Interviews

1. Present a Professional Appearance: Once again I am speaking from experience here. Do NOT hold the interview in a coffee shop or some other public location, you need to make sure you can close the door and ask very direct questions.

The first interview I held was in a Tim Horton’s and 30 seconds after it started I knew that it was a joke. If you have not moved into your office yet, then hold the interview in your home office but be professional. Schedule it for a time that there are not kids running around, your office is clean and you can be prepared. Also dress professional!

2. Have a Witness: This is sad but you need to make sure there is someone there with you or near by. My wife sat in on the interviews at first and the reason was experience from my previous job. The last thing you want is someone making false accusations against you because they did not get the job.

3. Have specific questions: Do not just have a general chit chat; you want to get specific answers and be as direct as possible. Make sure you go over the questions a few times before you start the interview so you are not surprised or fumbling through the questions. If you do not take the interviews serious, either will they.

4. Document Everything: Record the time, place and every detail of the conversation. This is a due diligence item on your part and not only will help you when the time comes to make the decision but also will protect you from any false accusation.

5. Follow up on any gut feelings: This was a huge mistake I also made and hope to spare you from. I had one girl say she quit her job because of her son and through the interview I realized she worked with my cousin. I asked her about that and she kind of shifted in her seat but she was adamant that she loved working with my cousin and they were good friends. Well I was so impressed with everything else in the interview that I did not follow up on that until after I hired her. Turns out she was fired from her job and did not come exactly highly rated.

IMPORTANT –> People can be great in interviews and even give great sounding references, this is not any guarantee what so ever that they are going to be good employees. Do your due diligence and do background checks, follow up on all references and if you know someone that knows them then ask.

Summary: Make sure you do not rush into any of this. Know what you need for office space and shop around every possible location. When posting the job ad, start small and test. Make sure to always be professional in your communications and interactions and keep records of everything. When having the interviews, plan, have a witness and follow up.

I realize this is a general overview but I truly hope it is giving you some solid ideas.

In the last post of this series I am going to talk about how to manage your new employees and some of the biggest mistakes of all that I made.

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Jason Katzenback is the voice behind Johncow.com and the author of “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” a FREE 130+ Page Case Study that is available for instant download at http://www.johncow.com/make-money-online.